Dialogic learning
It is also found in many other traditions; for example, the book The Argumentative Indian, written by Nobel Prize of Economics winner Amartya Sen, situates dialogic learning within the Indian tradition and observes that an emphasis on discussion and dialogue spread across Asia with the rise of Buddhism.
Among those, it is worth mentioning transformative learning theory; Michael Fielding, who sees students as radical agents of change;[8] Timothy Koschmann, who highlights the potential advantages of adopting dialogicality as the basis of education;[9] and Anne Hargrave, who demonstrates that children in dialogic-learning conditions make significantly larger gains in vocabulary, than do children in a less dialogic reading environment.
[11] At this point, it is important to mention the "Learning Communities", an educational project which seeks social and cultural transformation of educational centers and their surroundings through dialogic learning, emphasizing egalitarian dialogue among all community members, including teaching staff, students, families, entities, and volunteers.
As argued by Mikhail Bakhtin, children learn through persuasive dialogue rather than an authoritative transmission of facts, which enables them to understand by seeing from different points of view.
[15] It has been suggested by Robin Alexander that in dialogic education, teachers should frame questions carefully in order to encourage reflection and take different students' contributions and present them as a whole.
[17] Dialogic is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective applied to describe anything ‘relating to or in the form of dialogue’.
Dialogic education has been defined as engaging students in an ongoing process of shared inquiry taking the form of a dialogue[19] and as Robin Alexander outlines in his work on dialogic teaching, it involves drawing students into a process of co-constructing knowledge.
Instrumental dialogic pedagogy uses dialogue for achieving non-dialogic purposes, usually making students arrive at certain preset learning outcomes.
[37] Some appreciate its focus on asking good questions, attendance to subjectivity, use of provocations and contradictions, and the way it disrupts familiar and unreflected relations.
Gordon Wells (1999) defines "inquiry" not as a method but as a predisposition for questioning, trying to understand situations collaborating with others with the objective of finding answers.
"Dialogic inquiry" is an educational approach that acknowledges the dialectic relationship between the individual and the society, and an attitude for acquiring knowledge through communicative interactions.
Wells points out that the predisposition for dialogic inquiry depends on the characteristics of the learning environments, and that is why it is important to reorganize them into contexts for collaborative action and interaction.
Paulo Freire (1970) states that human nature is dialogic, and believes that communication has a leading role in our life.
Educators, in order to promote free and critical learning should create the conditions for dialogue that encourages the epistemological curiosity of the learner.
On the contrary, in communicative rationality, knowledge is the understanding provided by the objective world as well as by the intersubjectivity of the context where action develops.
If communicative rationality means understanding, then the conditions that make reaching consensus possible have to be studied.
We may attempt to have something we say to be considered good or valid by imposing it by means of force, or by being ready to enter a dialogue in which other people's arguments may lead us to rectify our initial stances.
The chavrusa rabbinic approach, for example, involved pairs of learners analyzing, discussing, and debating shared texts during the era of the Tannaim (approximately 10-220 CE).
[44] Dialogue was also a defining feature of early-Indian texts, rituals, and practices that spread across Asia with the rise of Buddhism.
[51] However it is interpreted, Socrates approach as described by Plato has been influential in informing modern-day conceptions of dialogue,[26] particularly in Western culture.
This is notwithstanding the fact that dialogic educational practices may have existed in Ancient Greece prior to the life of Socrates.
[54] A growing body of research indicates that dialogic methods lead to improved performance in students’ content knowledge, text comprehension, and reasoning capabilities.
