Educational design as conversation: A conversation analytical perspective on teacher dialogue

The aim of this methodological paper is to expound on and demonstrate the value of conversation-analytical research in the area of (informal) teacher learning. The author discusses some methodological issues in current research on interaction in teacher learning and holds a plea for conversation-analytical research on interactional processes in teacher encounters. As an illustration, an analysis is presented of the way university lecturers manage intersubjective understanding in an inter-professional meeting. With a micro-analytical focus on the architecture of turns, turn taking and the sequential organization of the interaction, the analysis shows how intersubjectivity is reached interactionally by the participants.     

Practical criticism of the art of conversation: A methodological critique

If conversation is a practical art, then a discipline that studies conversation should “assume the full burden of the critic. “In an effort to clarify and extend this notion, the present essay offers a tentative account of the methodological requirements of practical criticism, and examines six research studies representing various methodological approaches from that perspective. The critique suggests both the unique contributions of each method and the necessity for intense interaction among methods within the framework of a critical discipline.     

A conversation of teachers: In search of professional identity

The authors describe teacher professional identity as lived experience in the context of educational change. Adopting activity theory and its genesis in cultural historical theory (Stetsenko &; Arievitch, 2004) as a framework, the article discusses the way teachers see themselves as professionals and how they compose their identities in schools, the educational space, which is their workplace. Activity theory is utilised as the broad theoretical lens and the design type and methodology are discussed accordingly. The school and the classroom are activity systems (Engeström, 1991), and social and semiotic ecosystems (Lemke, 1995). It is therefore in the tensions within the activity system that we capture and represent a constructed teacher conversation, composed of the voices of three social actors on an imaginary social stage, which is the empirical text of the article. Main findings speak to multiple roles, struggling voice and forging professional identity in the changing educational landscape.     

A situative turn in the conversation on motivation theories

In this commentary I take a situative turn in the theoretical conversation around the question, “Why do people do what they do?” The first section describes in broad strokes what a situative perspective on motivation or engagement entails. Next, I comment on aspects of the five articles as they relate to the history and methods of socio-cognitive and situative approaches to understanding motives to learn. Then, using the central organizing framework of “meaning systems” in situative approaches, I suggest ways that a situative perspective might contribute to ongoing work in the five motivation theories and how some of the authors take steps in that direction.     

Continuing the conversation: British and Japanese progressivism

This paper offers an account of the historic and ongoing international interchange between Britain and Japan in the field of progressive education. Concentrating on the last half-century, it takes two reference points from Roy Lowe’s writings in 1977 and 2006. Eveline Lowe Primary was a newly built model progressive school when documented by him in a seminal work on school architecture, later becoming a key point of interest for Japanese educationists. The British educational policy context against which this exchange of ideas and practices occurred was later documented by Lowe in a major book. Contemporaneous debates and events within Japanese society and government meanwhile provided the impetus for networks of research and transmission of progressive practices. The most recent turn in the narrative presented here demonstrates Japanese support for independent progressive practice continuing in the UK. Responding to an extensive historical research literature on transnational migration of educational ideals and practices this paper constitutes a micro-study that draws on personal memory, oral testimony, records of classroom observation on site and by means of video-conferencing, in addition to more formal documentation of conference proceedings and policy-making.     

Cathedrals and doghouses: a conversation

This paper sets up an imaginary dialogue between an intrepid critical theorist and several interrogators. The dialogical form allows the author to explore the idea that all of society is a vat school, and that adult educators have a crucial intellectual role to play in the great debates of our age.