This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the…

Understanding how relationships between instructors and students develop is important for understanding the undergraduate student experience. We expect the development of positive relationships is related to the social practices (e.g., greetings, using names, sympathizing, or empathizing with students) that instructors use in the course of normal…

In this essay Sandra Vanderbilt explores philosophies of peace and protest through a dialectical reading of the works of Martin Luther King Jr., Daisaku Ikeda, and Paulo Freire, and considers these philosophies in relation to her own activism, specifically in the context of dealing with White postracial myths and more overt acts of racism. This…

Science teaching and learning are discursive practices, yet analysis of these practices has frequently been grounded in theorizations that place language at the forefront of interaction and meaning-making. Such language-centric analytic approaches risk overlooking key embodied, enacted aspects of students' engagement in science practices. This…

Bakhtin is a source of theoretical inspiration for educational research. This article will be an attempt to activate also Bakhtin's analytical practice and his methodology. I will explore and elaborate the typology of discursive relations which are suggested in Bakhtin's book on Problems of Dostoevsky' Poetics (Bakhtin ,1984), and the potential…

The monologues presented in this article represent a particular Bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual General Assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in Norway, the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), only two months after the school was opened, on November 2nd, 1967. In the meeting, they…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

The purpose of this article is to share highlights of a professional development workshop aimed at helping museum educators build capacity for difficult dialogues on race with adults. Public pedagogy affords museum educators a unique role in adult education as they facilitate adult learning on social justice issues. But in sharing with adults…

There is an increasing interest in developing learning analytic techniques for the analysis, and support of, high-quality learning discourse. This paper maps the terrain of discourse-centric learning analytics (DCLA), outlining the distinctive contribution of DCLA and outlining a definition for the field moving forwards. It is our claim that DCLA…

In educational discourse dialogue tends to be viewed as being (morally) superior to monologue. When we look at them as basic forms of communication, we find that dialogue is a two-way, one-to-one form and monologue is a one-way, one-to-many form. In this paper I revisit the alleged (moral) superiority of dialogue. First, I problematize certain…

Narratives have become increasingly important in the field of applied linguistics, as recent publications have illustrated, yet narrative analysis could still be considered undertheorized. This article outlines a specific, dialogical approach to the narrative analysis of data in qualitative research. Building on Bakhtin's notion of dialogue,…

This performance "testimonio" is the result of collaboration between two U.S. Latina graduate students/ university instructors: a Latina of Puerto Rican descent and a white Chicana. It is a dialogue in which the authors "come together to engage our differences, face-to-face, and work to find common ground" (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001, p. 1).…

The aim of the present article is to consider the research interview as a dialogical context for the production of social life and personal narratives. It is emphasized that interviews are inevitable, dialogical social events based on repertoires of socially and culturally embedded and constantly changing words and discourses. Rather than viewing…

In this article, we address the ways children collaborate to inquire about text in the context of group discussions, addressing the question: How do students stay on-topic and sustain their discussions of text? We speculate that a framework for dialogic discourse, referred to as exploratory talk, allows students to understand that discussions of…

One of the advantages of having students work in pairs on language-related tasks is that teachers and researchers can listen to what the students say as they carry out their assigned tasks. What they say offers insights into the students' beliefs about the target language they are learning and using, and reflects the cognitive processes they use…