Interactive or dialogic teaching? The case of the ‘inspirational’ teacher

Abstract

This paper explores some classroom approaches that student teachers on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education course tend to associate with inspirational teaching in English, and contrasts these with the direct interactive teaching recently advocated by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education and National Curriculum authorities for developing literacy. Interactive teaching can provide useful models of the strategies that mature readers use with different texts, and it can be encouraged in beginning teachers. Yet, inspirational teaching seems to offer more than this, and in less predictable ways than normal classroom competence. The dialogism and ‘answerabil‐ity’ that are central to the work of Bakhtin offer one way of exploring the relationship between self and other, and between subject as developing person and subject as sanctioned curriculum content, that may be operating in classrooms where pupils find themselves inspired to learn.