Dialogical approaches to learning: from theory to practice and back

Abstract

This paper explores a common educational dilemma, namely that of how to resource meaningful teaching and learning experiences, and the research challenge of how to represent the multimodal complexity of pedagogic intentions and instantiations. We share the sociocultural view of talk as a central tool in meaning making, aligned with attention to how teaching and learning conversations are mediated by communicative cues and interactions orchestrated across modes. We present extracts to exemplify the benefits of combining sociocultural discourse analysis (SCDA) and multimodal analysis, to explore classroom data at different levels of detail and temporal range. The context for the data collection was a series of lessons on the Great Fire of London with a Year 2 class (6–7 years). Lessons were part of a project using dance and interactive technologies to support understanding. We highlight the purposeful use of different analytic foci, enabled by SCDA and multimodal analysis, and explore what this can add to researchers' understanding of the contextualised nature of meaning making, building and weaving over time, in often unexpected ways. The original contribution of this paper is in offering an innovative mixed-methods approach to explore the complex detail, development and multimodal array of educational interaction.