Learning Together: Fostering Communities of Dialogic Inquiry

Solidly grounded in theory and empirical evidence, this book presents a novel methodological framework for fostering Communities of Dialogic Inquiry in primary education called Learning Together. These communities create collaborative networks of distributed cognition among school, university, and local community members to equip “apprentices” with a firm scientific foundation, complemented by a robust humanistic citizenship culture, enabling their participation in socioscientific practices in an informed, critical, responsible and inclusive fashion. Learning Together provides concrete, articulated, and richly illustrated teaching-learning strategies for cultivating these communities in diverse school and community settings. “In this book, the authors make a distinctive, strong and important contribution to our understanding of how education can be made most productive. They draw on a wealth of schools-based research, including their own, to link what is known about the ways humans learn and what can and should happen in classrooms. It should help to promote a more accurate conception of education as a social, cultural, communicative activity, rather than a process whereby teachers simply transmit knowledge to students. I hope it is read by teachers, researchers and others involved in education everywhere”. – Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, UK “For the authors of this fascinating and timely volume, communities of dialogic inquiry have two main aims: fostering skills that support a key human activity (learning for dialogue) and applying those skills in knowledge acquisition (learning through dialogue). The authors ground those aims in a novel yet convincing interpretation of sociocultural theory: the insightful and wide-ranging literature review that underpins their approach will be appreciated by researchers and practitioners alike. At the same time, the volume goes far beyond theory: it concludes with case studies, which indicate in detail how dialogic inquiry can be embedded in classrooms”. – Christine Howe, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge, UK