The Learning Space in Tutoring

Abstract

AbstractFollowing the relational turn that has been observed in the areas of therapy and medical care (cf. Dinis 2010), a similar trend is beginning to develop in education. One didactic manifestation is in academic tutoring, and can be considered as a prototype of personalized education, which is founded on interactivity, dialogicality, and languaging. In our text, we focus on the phenomenon of interactivity and, predominantly, languaging as the substrate for the emergence of a special domain. Here, the learning space is defined as “a cognitive situation where a learner attunes in his/her own epistemic change.” We observe that a learning space occurs as a teacher/tutor engages with aspects of the student’s/tutee’s epistemic frame by questioning, commenting on, or perspectivizing the utterances of the student. It follows that a learning space can be necessary but not sufficient for effective learning. As we show, some research into tutoring excessively idealizes it as an effective teaching tool. In the course of our brief scrutiny we find that success of the learning process also draws on factors like:being preparedbeing good at hearing and using hintsbeing willing to improvise a learning trajectoryallowing some degree of interdependence with the tutorusing many kinds of first-order activity