Afterword: Dialogic space

ABSTRACT

This final article in this special issue on dialogic space discusses some of the themes raised and points towards the future. It begins with a brief recollection of how the idea of dialogic space as a guide to teaching began in the 1990s in research on classroom talk. The articles in this issue show some of the ways in which the use of dialogic space has expanded since then to provide a range of pedagogical tools and insights in different contexts. While rooted in practice, dialogic space also suggests a new theory of education pointing to the importance of not just transmitting knowledge and skills but also expanding dialogue. Challenges to the application of dialogic space theory in education are reflected upon, and the growing role of technology is considered. The paper ends with the relevance of research on dialogic space in education as a way of responding to some of our most pressing problems.

Introduction

Each of the papers in this special issue illustrate different ways in which teachers can act to open, widen and deepen dialogic space. Dialogic space, a space of new possibilities for learning that opens up in the surface of things when there is a tension between different perspectives, is a reality of human experience that has been pointed to many times by different authors in a range of genres, disciplines and cultural traditions. In this sense, as a reality of our experience, dialogic space is not the sort of thing that you can discover or invent, but you can point to it and find ways to use it more fruitfully within education. The specific way of thinking about dialogic space focused upon in this special issue, dialogic space as a pedagogical tool for improving groupwork in classrooms, grew out of research on classroom talk in the 1990s in the UK. It emerged as an answer to the question: What characterizes successful group talk? However, it is also true that taking the experience of opening, widening, and deepening dialogic space seriously moves us beyond practice in classrooms to imply a theory of education—or at least a new way of thinking about the purpose of education. It is common to think of education as the transmission of knowledge and skills: dialogic education, on the other hand, is more about expanding the range of different voices and perspectives that can be drawn upon in order to understand any given topic. This vision of education as drawing learners into an expanding spiral of dialogue does not contradict the need for the transmission of information but goes beyond it and gives it a larger purpose—in order to participate in the dialogue and to take it further. In this final article, I revisit some moments from the birth of dialogic space theory in education; I outline again some of its implications for theory as well as for practice; and I explore some of the innovative ways of using dialogic space offered by the different papers in this special issue. I end with the argument that education for expanding dialogic space might be the best way that we have to respond to some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Beginnings: A UK primary school in the 1990s

Over the years, I have researched many groups of children and young people talking together in educational contexts—far too many to recall—but whenever I search for an illustrative example of how dialogue works to promote understanding, I find myself turning back to a particular group of 9-year-old children working on graphical puzzles in a classroom in central England in 1994. I suspect that the talk of these children is burnt into my memory because it was in analyzing this group that the reality of dialogic space first hit home to me. I have shared this example of talk in numerous papers, articles, and talks since. But each time I see new aspects of ites. This time, focus with me on the first few utterances that the children make as they work together around the same puzzle, the first time unsuccessfully and the second time successfully after they had been taught with a series of pilot “Thinking Together” lessons (Dawes et al., 2004; Wegerif & Mercer, 1997; Wegerif et al., 1999; Wegerif, 2007). Figure 1 shows the specific puzzle that they are working on, just to give you some context.

Figure 1. The puzzle they were talking about.¹

Pre-test talk: First exchanges around this puzzle before the Thinking Together lessons

Trisha:

Square and diamond, it’s 2

George:

No it’s not

Trisha:

It is 2

George:

No it’s not

Trisha:

It is

George:

No it’s not

Post-test talk: First exchanges around this puzzle after the Thinking Together lessons

Trisha:

That has got to be a diamond, a square with a diamond with a circle in that one, number 6, do you agree?

George:

No, what do you mean?

Trisha:

OK no it’s got to be square

[pause]

In the first session, the disputatious talk continued like this for a short time and did not lead to a correct answer. In the second, after this opening, there was a longer discussion comparing a range of different possible answers before finding the correct answer. Both episodes begin in the same way: Trisha makes a claim and George does not agree with it. But the spirit behind this exchange is very different, as is the way that it is articulated. In the second episode Trisha adds a key question: “do you agree?” thereby inviting the other 2 children in the group (Susan was also there but quite quiet most of the time) to think together with her. When George disagrees with Trisha in the first episode, his challenge is abrupt and aggressive; when he challenges again in the second episode, his approach is different: He addresses Trisha and invites shared thinking by asking “what do you mean?”

So, what happens when George does not agree and asks for an explanation? It is quite common to say that in a dialogue we are drawn out to see things through the eyes of another person. But this is not exactly what happens here. Trisha does not show much interest in what George is thinking or why he disagrees with her. His challenge did not lead her to see the puzzle through his eyes—rather it prompted her to look at it again. In looking again, she realized that she had not been right the first time she spoke; the puzzle had features that meant that her initial answer did not work. In looking at it again she was also looking again at her initial opinion and questioning this. This ability to look again, question, reflect, and change one’s mind was a key feature of the more successful talk of the children around the puzzles.

These 2 exchanges illuminate how the way that the children talked together helped [or did not help] them to solve the puzzle. Asking questions like “do you agree?” and “what do you mean?” made a difference. But it was not obvious that explicit reasoning was useful in directly solving the puzzle. When they eventually do solve the puzzle, there is a long pregnant pause, brows furrowed, all looking at the puzzle and then the answer seems to pop out of nowhere. A light of understanding dawns on Trisha’s face and she tries to explain to the others why the answer must be 5, but she is not very clear in the way that she explains this. George says “I do not understand this at all” and Trisha tries again hitting on the phrase “taking the circle out.” George gets excited and repeats Trisha’s explanation word for word using the phrase “taking the circle out.” So, the words help to articulate and to share the solution once this is arrived at. Using words to be able to point to the metaphorical act of “taking the circle out” as one moves from left to right across the page makes the answer 5 evident to everyone in the group. It enables them to reenact the way in which Trisha found the answer. But from the fact that she could not explain the answer at first, it seems that these words were not the original cause of her solving the puzzle. The way of using language taught by our “Thinking Together” lessons did help, but it did not directly solve the problem. Language helped in a more indirect kind of way. Asking “do you agree?” opened a space of shared reflection—a dialogic space. George’s “what do you mean?” widened and deepened this, forcing a questioning of initial assumptions. This opening, widening and deepening of a shared dialogic space seemed to play an important causal role in finding the correct answer.

Dialogue as respect: Looking twice and becoming double

In the introduction to this special issue, Maureen Boyd and Mike Sherry raise the important issue of mutual respect between people in dialogue. “Re-spect” is from a Latin root meaning “to look again.” To respect someone means to look again at their actions and their words, to try to understand them, not just to accept our first judgment but to try harder to see if they are saying something that we can learn from. In the first episode of talk, Trisha was not able to change her mind because she was on the defensive and feeling threatened by the aggressive tone of George’s challenge. He wanted to be right, and she did not want to concede that she was wrong. After our “Thinking Together” intervention the tone shifted to be more collaborative and respectful. Here, respect can be seen not as something extra added onto the cognition, an extra layer of values perhaps, but as an essential part of the cognition. Dialogue does not work unless people are able to listen to each other and learn from each other, so values are intrinsic: successful dialogue requires a certain orientation toward the other characterized by respect and intellectual humility, treating the other as someone from whom one might have something to learn.

Trisha was able to change her mind because she could look back at what she had said and in looking back at it she could see that it was not correct. Without the dialogue, without the prompt from George, she would not have looked back. The act of looking back implies a witness position that seems to always be there as part of any dialogue. By witness, I just mean that Trisha did not only speak—she also listened to herself speaking as if she was someone else, someone outside of the dialogue between her and George listening to both of them. Each participant in a dialogue has the same experience of doubleness. As Boyd and Sherry bring out in this Issue, there is a difference between each person speaking their words in parallel and in a real dialogue. In this shared act of listening to our speech with the same degree of both detachment and empathy with which we listen to the speech of others, we become united together in the community of participants in a dialogue.

Over the years I have increasingly come to realize the significance of the witness position to the experience of dialogic space. It is by taking the witness position that one is able to listen to one’s own words, consider them in relation to other words, reflect on them and, if needed, change them. This ability to step back from one’s own identity and see oneself as if from the outside perspective of a witness is then what opens up a space of possibilities and of possible learning. Those able to enter into dialogue are able to do so because they can allow themselves to become double, oscillating in tension between 2 perspectives, their own first-person perspective as 1 voice in the dialogue and the third-person perspective of a witness looking back at what is said and relating it to what others have said and to the problem or questions motivating the dialogue going forward.

A shift in how we think about teaching thinking

Min-Young Kim (2024) brings out why dialogic space is different from other approaches to understanding collaborative learning. Dialogic space is described by Kim as an environment where multiple, incommensurate perspectives are held together in a creative tension. Unlike traditional argumentation, which often focuses on winning or on the structural components of an argument (claims, evidence, and warrants), dialogic space emphasizes the importance of engaging with diverse viewpoints. The article by Kim further explores how dialogic space can be opened, deepened, and widened through specific teaching practices. Opening dialogic space involves recognizing and addressing the differences in opinions or perspectives (dialogic gaps) and inviting students to explore these tensions. Deepening dialogic space happens when teachers and students examine and reflect on the beliefs and assumptions underpinning arguments. Widening dialogic space is about inviting and engaging with multiple voices, including those of texts and imagined audiences.

A study led by Sylvia Rojas-Drummond proved seminal for me in clearly disentangling “exploratory talk” from “explicit reasoning.” Sylvia and her team taught upper primary age children in Mexico City the ground rules of “Thinking Together.” Her innovation was to use 2 different evaluation tasks: 1 group was given the reasoning tests that we had been using in the UK and the other a more creative task, writing a short text together (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2006). As expected, the groups taught Thinking Together solved more reasoning tests and did so using more explicit reasoning. However, the groups doing the more creative writing task also did better, according to a rigorous evaluation of the quality of the final outcomes and also of the quality of the creative writing process, but these groups did not use more explicit reasoning. This experimental study suggests that there is something about the Thinking Together approach to pedagogy that helps groups think together better even when there is no explicit reasoning. That something is, I suspect, the opening, widening and deepening of a shared dialogic space.

Indeed, Boyd et al. (2024) and Maine (2024) exemplify this shift away from a focus on explicit reasoning and toward a focus on using words to open up a creative space of possibility. Maine, quoting Boyd’s work in this area, shows how, by using language of possibility words like “might,” “maybe,” and “could,” students can share ideas that are tentative and open-ended, thus creating a richer, more inclusive, and collaborative thinking space.

A new set of pedagogical tools

Perhaps the understandable desire to pin things down to precise meanings and clearly defined linear causal relations that has brought success in some areas of science does not work so well in understanding how to teach collective thinking in education. Teachers inhabit a world of meanings already embedded within relationships that are dynamic and dialogic. The discipline of education needs to provide the kind of tools that can help teachers take thinking and learning forward as they respond contingently in rich contexts. Kim (2024) outlines a few key concepts associated with dialogic space in the form of pedagogical tools: opening the space by exploring an initial question or divergence of views, widening the space by adding more voices and deepening the space with guided reflection on framing assumptions. All the articles in this issue build on Kim’s summary of pedagogical tools associated with dialogic space and provide evidence that teachers can act to open and expand dialogic space in a way that has positive benefits both for learners as individuals and for communities of learners.

Boyd et al. (2024) illustrate the use of what they call “response-able talk practices,” which are interactional patterns where the teacher actively listens and responds to students’ needs and contributions, an approach which helps to signal to students that their thoughts and contributions are valued, encouraging them to engage more fully in classroom discussions. This article also offers many other practical suggestions for how teachers can encourage and support dialogic space in their classrooms. Like Fiona Maine (2024), they point out the importance of encouraging provisional language to support thinking in terms of a language of possibility. They illustrate how, by modeling and encouraging the use of words like “might,” “could,” and “maybe,” teachers invite open-ended discussions where ideas are presented as possibilities rather than certainties, thus promoting an inclusive atmosphere where all viewpoints are respected and explored.

While both articles argue for the pivotal role of language of possibility in fostering dialogic spaces in the classroom, Maine extends this work through “DIALLS” (Dialogue and Argumentation for cultural Literacy Learning in Schools), a project that produced resources that are highly regarded by practitioners interested in promoting dialogic space. The DIALLS website offers a teaching program designed to enhance dialogue in the classroom through meaningful, authentic discussions in response to short films. An exemplary practice highlighted in Maine’s article is the use of visual texts such as wordless books or films, which serve as inclusive, stimulating resources that provoke imagination and discussion. These tools support the creation of a dialogic space of possibility, where students are encouraged to think creatively and explore a multitude of perspectives. They also promote a more inclusive sense of identity. But as Bouton, Lefstein, Segal, and Snell (this volume) point out, teaching for dialogic space cannot be reduced to any simple formulas; it is not just about establishing ground rules or structures for discussion. Each time and in each context, it requires additional conditions such as tension between perspectives, openness to others, and acceptance of unpredictability.

A new direction for education

King, Boyd and Reid (this issue) use the example of introducing diverse voices in a way that maintains the collective dialogue while expanding it to include voices sometimes marginalized in education. The direction of travel in this kind of education is not the transmission of facts but an expansion of awareness and understanding. As Kim points out, part of the educational aim is about appropriating dialogic space. In practice, appropriating the dialogic space means being able to understand issues or events from many perspectives at once. It is less about transmitting a fixed curriculum of knowledge and skills and more about facilitating the growth of wisdom through an expansion of identity and consciousness.

Some might find this sort of claim, the idea of the expansion of awareness and empathy, a bit vague and hard to operationalize. It is interesting in this context that 1 established psychometric tradition in psychology has found that it is possible to measure growth in the direction of what is called “integrative complexity”—a concept which seems quite closely related to the idea of a growth in the capacity for dialogue (Békés & Suedfeld, 2020). People or groups with high integrative complexity are able to see and appreciate the complexity of issues, consider different perspectives, and find ways to reconcile conflicting viewpoints. In contrast, low integrative complexity is characterized by black-and-white thinking, where issues are viewed in a simplistic manner as either right or wrong, good or bad. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is a correlation between low integrative complexity and a tendency to extremist violence. Integrative complexity is certainly part of the journey of dialogic education. One possible difference, however, between the tradition of thought behind “integrative complexity” and that behind dialogic space might be that the integration of multiple diverse perspectives on any given issue in dialogic space is not seen in purely cognitive terms but as also about inclusion, empathy, and an embodied expansion of identity. The direction of travel for individuals and groups is about allowing a greater range of voices to share in the same dialogic space—a space characterized by mutual respect and the feeling of an at least partially shared identity that comes from being members of a community in dialogue together.

Another objection some might offer is that while dialogue can work for topics that do not threaten the identity commitments of students, like literature in the case of King, Boyd, and Reid or discussing paintings in the article by Maine, it is not possible for issues that are more challenging. Work by Yifat Kolikant and colleagues responds to this with a pedagogy enabling dialogs between young Arabs and Jews within Israel with regard to their recent shared history. Online debates did not lead to agreement but did lead to a clear and measurable shift from dismissing the perspective of the other group to acknowledging it as a legitimate voice in the dialogue, albeit one that they did not agree with (Kolikant & Pollack, 2015). Here the pedagogy used to enable these dialogs is interesting. The dialogs were online and the direct asynchronous debates between groups of Arab high-school students and groups of Jewish high school students were focused on producing a joint report after each group had read and commented on the reports separately produced by the other group. In other words, a great deal of creative effort was put into the scaffolding required to support some dialogic space in this difficult context. The message here, as in all the articles in this special issue, is that creating dialogic space in classrooms is possible, but it is not always easy, and often requires making an effort to develop an innovative pedagogy that works in each unique context.

Dialogic space and love

A very specific, context-bound and contingent pedagogy is described in the article by Witte and Juzwik (2024) about love and liminality. This article describes how Ms. Thompson, an elementary school teacher in an urban Reformed Christian school, orchestrated a letter-writing exchange between her students and her incarcerated uncle, Mr. Thompson. This exchange allows students to explore new perspectives, learn about different life experiences, and make spiritual connections through sharing biblical references. The concept draws from the idea of the “beloved community” as envisioned by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where love and connection transcend traditional boundaries. Ms. Thompson’s pedagogy is informed by her own familial connections and religious beliefs, which she brings into her classroom to deepen the learning experience. Although unique, and with its own challenges, this example of expanding dialogic space in the classroom suggests some more general and transferable pedagogical principles including the role of teachers as “door openers” who facilitate connections between different social worlds. It suggests that through such initiatives, teachers can guide students to engage in deeper, more empathetic dialogue with a diverse range of individuals.

The word love is also used by Paulo Freire, who claims that love is the motivation behind dialogue (Freire, 1970). It is worth reflecting a little more on the use of the word love in this context. Love can perhaps be defined as the experience of seeing or feeling the self in the other, where previously there was only a feeling of externality or distance and difference. In this sense expanding dialogic space is very much about love. But the reference to the Christian tradition in which God is referred to as being love (English Standard Version Bible, 2016, 1 John 4:7–21), points to the fact that this kind of love is not quite the same as the love of one separate self for another separate self across an external space of difference.

I think Buber is perhaps our best guide to the kind of universal love that is an aspect of educational dialogue. Buber originated a version of the idea of dialogic space in his classic work I and Thou (first published in 1923 and translated to English in 1937—here referenced as Buber, 1970). This short book begins with the claim that “man is twofold,” drawing our attention to the 2 fundamental modes of being in relation to the world: “I-It” (Ich-Es) and “I-Thou” (Ich-Du). The I-It mode of relationship, or type of orientation toward the “other,” generates a world of objects. In doing so, we can find ourselves trapped within an apparently objective world that we create around us, as if we are just a small space of internality within a much larger external reality. The I-Thou mode of relationship, on the other hand, allows us to connect to the presence of another person, someone we do not see as an object and address as “thou.” This allows an expansion of our internality, a sense of finding ourselves in the other person who first seemed to be external to us. Buber claims that, in dialogue, as well as being in relationship with specific other people, we also find ourselves in a relationship with what Buber refers to as the “Eternal Thou.”

The idea of an “Eternal Thou” sounds like it might be referring to a specific religious faith but I think that what Buber is talking about here can be understood independently of any faith tradition as a universal and necessary aspect of dialogue. Taking the I-Thou orientation toward anyone or anything—a person like Ms Thompson’s uncle, or a tree, or even perhaps a chatbot such as chatGpt—can open, Buber claims, a dialogic space. This orientation opens up a space of relationship that goes beyond the 2 external or physically defined parties involved. In the space, as I described earlier in the case of the dialogue between Trisha and George, one is led to see oneself as if from the outside, as if from a “witness” position.

Atle Skaftun (2024) brings out a related logic—or dialogic perhaps—for the experience of events in time. In his article, he explores how Bakhtin’s “eventness” relates to dialogic space: for a teacher, a lesson depends on being both “outside” the event (as author, who makes the lesson plan), and “inside” the event (like the literary hero or novelistic character who is subject to the emerging plot)—that is, a teacher must be responsible for planning but also surrender to the uncertainty of collaboration with/among students and other stakeholders (including researchers, as in the case Skaftun explores).

The “witness” position in the dialogue cannot be pinned down or defined. In one context, we might think of the witness as the community of scientists, in another context we might think of it with a culturally informed image of the Buddha or Jesus, but even as we engage in dialogue with this image a further witness position emerges. Buber’s concept of dialogue with the “Eternal Thou” is a way of saying that dialogic space has no fixed boundary—in principle it has an infinite capacity to generate new perspectives and new meaning. A capacity to include everyone. What Buber is talking about as the “Eternal Thou” is the strange idea of explicitly engaging in dialogue with a witness position that is not defined: using a phrase from Levinas I have referred to this elsewhere as dialogue with the Infinite Other (Levinas, 1981). One way of thinking about dialogic education might be as a way to move students from a position of feeling isolated and perhaps alienated as a separate self in a physical world to one of recognizing a certain almost umbilical connection to others on the inside of their identity, not just to specific others such as friends or to generalized others such as a flag or a church, but to all others. One possible aspect of dialogic education that this article by Witte and Juzwik points to, for me, might be about helping students feel more at home in the universe.

The role of technology

Most studies of dialogue in education tend to assume the face-to-face oral mode as a default. But if we think of orality as a kind of communications technology, we can see that it has limitations as well as strengths. One limitation is an inability to include the voices of people who are not present. In the Witte and Juzwik article referred to above, a person who was excluded from face-to-face dialogue by being in prison was included through the medium of writing letters. In the article by Sherry et al. (2024) some extra affordances of an online medium for dialogue are outlined, especially the way in which switching modes from oral synchronous dialogue online to written chat can provide a side channel for commenting on the main dialogue and for saving face when the main dialogue becomes challenging. One of the messages to emerge from this special issue, including the use of paintings in the article by Maine (2024), is that it is important to research and reflect upon the different possible affordances of different media for dialogic space.

In many ways, the dialogic space approach in education outlined in this special issue is a reaction against the dominance of writing in education and a kind of insurgency in favor of face-to-face oral dialogue. I recall children I was working with in primary schools turning to each other after a whole lesson talking together and saying “we did no work.” They interpreted talk as play, even when they were talking intelligently about topics in the curriculum. Work, for them, involved writing things down in their exercise books and getting them marked by the teacher. Under the influence of the prestige of print literacy, Knowledge is frequently written about as if it were an object that can be transmitted into minds, like a diagram in a textbook that students memorize and reproduce in exams. This is rather different from knowledge and education in oral cultures. The oral thinker Socrates was famously against writing, believing it encouraged superficial understanding. True understanding, he argued, is not found on the written page, but rather requires dynamic question-and-answer exchanges involving challenging and reframing ideas across a range of perspectives (Plato, 1952).

Different technologies used since Socrates, such as print textbooks, blackboards, and now electronic screens, all have different educational affordances that need to be understood. As Sherry, Dunn and O’Brien bring out, the multi-modality of online learning environments has affordances for the deepening of dialogue as well as limitations. The recent technology of Generative AI (GAI) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) is seen by many as a threat to established education systems, but it also has the potential to support more dialogue. Contrary to the rather unfortunate claim of “Artificial Intelligence,” this is not an “intelligence” set against humans, but rather a language assistant that serves as an interface, accessing and making available the resources of the continuously expanding Internet. Engaging with GAI effectively enables a dialogue with the collective knowledge shared and documented on the Internet about a particular topic, or at least that is indexed by searchbots informing the LLM, potentially offering a new form of educational dialogue if we can learn how to use it effectively. This new kind of dialogue is both collective and individual, with the act of framing questions and responding to the answers given by GAI opening a personal dialogic space of reflection that is unique for each user. There is also obvious potential for GAI to be used as a support for guided small group inquiry learning, not only providing up-to-date information as a web-search can do but also acting as a facilitator, asking questions and guiding the dialogue (Wegerif & Major, 2023).

The challenge now posed by GAI to education might serve as a spur to rethinking what we are doing as dialogue—not only face-to-interface interactions but also dialogic engagement with the long-term dialogs of culture. This shift enables learners to become participants in the ongoing journey of collective knowledge and identity formation. Socrates’ focus on teaching learners how to ask better questions might be seen as a timely response to the challenge of GAI. Perhaps answering the question of how to design for the future of education in response to GAI requires at least a partial return to the more oral past of education, when living dialogue was valued more than written texts and every exam was viva voce – meaning “with living voice.”

The future of dialogic space

Through the articles in this special issue, it is heartening to see how the idea of dialogic space is being found useful by educational researchers and teachers in many different contexts. Each of the articles show that teaching for dialogic space is not an easy solution but requires creativity from teachers to make it work, in contingent response to the needs of different learners and different classrooms. But nonetheless, there is much that can be learned from these examples and from other examples where dialogue has been opened and expanded in ways that are educationally valuable. One way forward is to bring teachers and researchers together online to share their pedagogy for dialogic space. CamTree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, (camtree.org) is trying to do just that. Generative AI enhances teachers’ support to write reports on their close-to-practice research on dialogic space and to share them such that any teacher in any context who wants to try teaching with dialogic space can find advice, examples, and perhaps also a community of practice.

In the introduction to this special issue, Maureen Boyd and Mike Sherry mentioned some of the challenges we face, especially the challenge of polarization. When Internet use first became widespread, many were optimistic about its potential to bring people together. Now, many blame social media on the Internet for the apparently increasing threat of polarization into entrenched opposing positions. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that the Internet does not work to bring people together on its own. This is even more true of the enhanced Internet that can be seen in the new wave of generative AI tools threatening to transform education. Just as we take it for granted that for literacy to work, we need universal education in literacy, perhaps it is time to wake up and realize that if we want this modern interconnected world to work for us, then we need universal education in dialogue. Dialogic space is about the very real experience of feeling empowered and enriched through participation with others. It might not always be easy to teach, but it might also prove to be essential if we are to have a future characterized by collective flourishing or perhaps even if we are to have a future at all.

Additional resources

1. https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/

A dialogue-based approach to the development of children’s thinking and learning Spoken Language with resources based on the Thinking Together tradition with many downloadable resources for researchers and teachers, useful publications, research projects and links to other relevant websites.

2. https://camtree.org/

Camtree—the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange—is a new global platform for close-to-practice research in education. Its mission is to support, promote and publish “close-to-practice” educational research by educators to improve teaching and lead to better outcomes for learners worldwide. Camtree is the world’s first platform that helps teachers and educational leaders both to improve learning and share their knowledge.

3. https://www.edudialogue.org/professional-learning/mooc-on-dialogue/

The Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research (CEDiR) Group presents a series of free, open online courses for teachers and educators. Each course lasts 6 weeks and can be taken as a “live course” with a cohort of teachers or a self-paced course. These courses are for all teachers and educators interested in learning to use dialogic approaches to enhance their teaching and improve learning including those working in any setting and with any age group.

4. Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Taylor & Francis.

Dialogic education builds upon decades of practical classroom research to offer a method of teaching that applies the power of dialogue to achieving conceptual mastery. Easy-to-follow template lesson plans and activity ideas are provided, each of which has been tried and tested in classrooms and is known to succeed. Providing a structure for engaging children and creating an environment in which dialogue can flourish; this book is separated into 3 parts:

• • Establishing a classroom culture of learning;

• • Core concepts across the curriculum;

• • Wider dialogs: Educational adventures in the conversation of mankind.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. From Ravens’s Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven et al., 2000).