Teacher learning through dialogue with colleagues, self and students

Background: Although dialogue is often regarded as a vehicle for teacher professional development and learning, particularly in relation to verbal interactions between teachers, its uses remain limited. Deepening the understanding of dialogue in its fullest sense, and its potential applications in education, may help to unleash its power in supporting how teachers learn in various contexts. Purpose and sources: This discussion paper aims to explore and conceptualise the complex construct of authentic dialogue for teacher professional learning. It draws on the notion of dialogue and other related concepts within the Bakhtinian tradition. For this purpose, it begins by situating this approach in the context of various views about dialogue. Forming the heart of the paper is the application of these concepts to a proposal for three channels of dialogue for teacher learning in professional contexts: dialogue with colleagues, dialogue with self, and dialogue with students. Main argument: Diverging from the common notion of dialogue, Bakhtin’s dialogue connotes complexity, involving multiple perspectives from those present or absent from the dialogue, including super-addressees. Dialogue and related concepts in Bakhtin’s tradition can help us gain a fuller and more sophisticated understanding of how teachers learn through collaboration with different learning partners through space and time–including with self and students, in addition to colleagues. It is argued that adopting a Bakhtinian lens to dialogue can potentially engender complex but enriched teacher learning. Conclusion: The paper offers an exploratory conceptual framework as a way of examining teacher learning through authentic dialogue. It promotes awareness of the need for researchers to sensitise themselves to the meaning of teachers’ utterances in particular contexts through time and space to better understand visible and invisible perspectives, as well as the voices influencing teachers’ words. The proposed early-stage framework has the potential to be developed and refined further through future theoretical and empirical research.