This thesis sets for itself the task of testing the viability of a dialogic model of learning as a methodology for teaching critical thinking in reading and writing to undergraduate students of Thai in Thailand. To this end, we conducted an experiment involving twenty-one undergraduate students of Thai at KhonKaen University, Thailand. This study presents the intellectual background of the pedagogic framework supporting the experiment and a discussion of its outcomes. The assessment of the results of the experiment focuses on the forms of evidence resulting directly from this pedagogic framework. The study concludes with a number of considerations for future research in critical thinking which our project helped us to identify. For the purpose of our work, we adopt the model of dialogic learning which involves students in looking for perspectives enabling them to challenge, and as a result to enhance, the relevance of the understandings in which they frame their interactions. The process is dialogic because it involves students in working with different points of view by identifying challenging perspectives, constructing conflicting arguments and exploring the strategic potential that the interaction of these arguments may have on the students? initial assumptions. In this sense, the concept of dialogue that we use refers to the methodology of students? inquiry (learning), rather than a specific form of linguistic genre. In our view, this definition is suitable to all fields of inquiry considering that each field deals with evaluation of the strategic (enabling) power of its assumptions. In the course of this work, we establish the relevance of the above concept of dialogic inquiry against a multitude of ideas regarding the suitability of different approaches to the teaching of critical thinking. We illustrate that, typically, teaching approaches value questioning as a means for generating reasoned arguments. However, the originality of the dialogic model used in this thesis lies in its ability to focus pedagogic environments on students? strategic engagement in social interactions, rather than on the process of questioning alone. Consequently, in our study we assess the quality of students? learning by identifying the contexts indicating the quality of students? social engagement. These included gauging the community?s interest in the students? project, the depth of students? exploratory work, their ability to work together and students? own personal involvement in their project. These outcomes helped us to reflect on the quality of the teaching model which we designed in order to promote the critical thinking process. The emphasis on students? strategic engagement in social interactions allowed us to break away from the conventional concerns with the link between classroom learning and real-world tasks. Instead, our students engaged in the task of creating a Thai News Network (TNN), an Internet-based broadcasting channel, involving students in generating for themselves the meaning of the objectives of their academic subject in the contexts of challenges that they experienced when creating the channel and its (news) articles. Our data analysis shows that the concept of a Thai News Network proved very successful despite the conventional beliefs that Thai students would find it difficult to be critical thinkers. As we demonstrate throughout the entire thesis, the main issue in teaching critical thinking is not, as it is often assumed, to ask students to critique the teacher or other authority texts. Rather, it is to create conditions enabling students to identify, and to work with, conflicting perspectives in order to create for themselves increasingly better informed and more inclusive strategies for acting in the world. This may not be an original purpose, but our study offers an original pedagogic framework for facilitating this objective.

This research has taken place at a time when governments in Australia, like governments throughout the Western world, have given higher priority to funding teachers’ professional learning. This support for teachers’ learning tends to be informed by standards-based ‘reforms’ of schooling, underpinned by narrowly individualistic paradigms of teacher knowledge and enacted in managerial models of professional development. The effectiveness of this ‘PD’ for individual teachers tends to be measured in rigid accountability regimes. My study is a conceptual, grounded and reflexive inquiry into teachers’ professional learning in Victoria, Australia. Central to the study is a multi-levelled account of a small group of English-literature teachers at Eastern Girls’ College, in Melbourne, Australia, learning about literary theory over a period of fourteen months. These teachers operate within an institutional setting in which they are certainly expected to be accountable in managerial terms, and yet they can be seen negotiating a very different paradigm of professional learning. In my account of their learning in this study, I develop a model of inquiry-based professional learning that offers a richly dialogic alternative to narrowly individualistic paradigms of professional knowledge and professional development.

Det är vår uppgift som lärare att skapa en verbal klassrumsinteraktion som främjar elevers inlärning och kunskapsutveckling. Det här examensarbetet grundar sig i tanken om att lärare behöver redskap för att kunna analysera sin egen undervisning i ämnet svenska och därmed främja klassrumsinteraktionen. Syftet med föreliggande studie är därför att med hjälp av analysredskapet Dialogic Inquiry Tool, DIT, dels identifiera i vilken omfattning dialog förekommer i fyra lärares svenskundervisning, dels synliggöra på vilket sätt DIT kan stödja lärarna i att utveckla den verbala interaktionen i klassrummet. Examensarbetet tar sin ansats i ett sociokulturellt perspektiv om lärande med fokus på Zone of Proximal Development, ZPD, och mediering. Studien genomförs med kvalitativa metoder i form av observationer och semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultatet visar att lärarna föredrar en dialogisk undervisning men att det är svårt att komma ifrån den IRE-struktur som sedan länge dominerat klassrummen. Lärarna diskuterar hur ett klassrumsklimat där eleverna vågar dela med sig av sina tankar och åsikter påverkar interaktionen i klassrummet. Balansgången mellan att låta eleverna utveckla sina tankegångar och tiden kan vara en problematisk faktor eftersom lärarna måste hålla sig inom tidsramen för den föreliggande lektionen. Sammanfattningsvis ser lärarna analysredskapet DIT som ett tämligen enkelt sätt att kritiskt granska sin egen praktik. Genom DIT får lärarna bland annat en chans att uppmärksamma och bli medvetna om rådande interaktionsmönster, hur feedback och respons ges och hur de som lärare kan påverka graden av dialog i klassrummet.

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This dissertation offers the first set of empirical studies to examine the differential impact of didactic instruction and playful learning practices on geometric shape knowledge. Previous research demonstrated that successful child-centered, guided play pedagogies are often characterized by two components: (a) dialogic inquiry, or exploratory talk with the teacher, and (b) physical engagement with the educational materials. Building on this conclusion, three studies examined how guided play promotes criterial learning of shapes. Experiment 1 examined whether guided play or didactic instruction techniques promote criterial learning of four geometric shapes compared to a control condition. Results suggested that children in both didactic and guided play conditions learn the criterial features; however, this equivalence was most evident for relatively easy, familiar shapes (e.g., circles). A trend suggested that guided play promoted superior criterial understanding when learning more complex, novel shapes (i.e., pentagons). Experiment 2 expands on the previous study by examining how exposure to enriched geometric curricular content (e.g., teaching with typical shape exemplars only vs. typical and atypical exemplars) augments shape learning in guided play. As hypothesized, children taught with a mix of typical and atypical exemplars showed superior criterial learning compared to those in taught with only typical exemplars. Experiment 3 further explores the factors that facilitate shape learning by comparing the effectiveness of guided play, enriched free-play, and didactic instruction on children's criterial learning of two familiar shapes (triangles, rectangles) and two unfamiliar, complex shapes (pentagons, hexagons). As hypothesized, those who learned via guided play outperformed those who learned in didactic instruction who, in turn, outperformed those in enriched free play. In both didactic instruction and guided play, children's shape concepts persisted over one week. The findings from these studies suggest (1) guided play promotes equal or better criterial learning than didactic instruction, (2) curricular content (shape experience) augments criterial learning in guided play and (3) dialogic inquiry may be a key mechanism underlying guided play. The current research not only has implications for enhancing the acquisition of abstract spatial concepts but also for understanding the mechanisms that foster playful learning. / Psychology

In 2001, an estimated 50 Indigenous languages were spoken in California, USA; none had more than 100 speakers. Through statewide efforts by Indigenous language workers and their allies, revitalization strategies have since proliferated, many highlighting immersion learning and linguistic documentation. In their homeland in Tehachapi, California, two fluent Elders and five learner/teachers designed this study as co-researchers to reflect on the effects of strategies we had implemented to support new speakers of nuwä abigip (Kawaiisu), a polysynthetic Uto-Aztecan language. Our community-based team used methods of dialogic inquiry including the conversational method and a graphic language mapping technique. We videotaped remembered stories of our varied language acquisition experiences, focusing especially on the 15 years after community language revitalization was initiated. The collection of videotaped narratives and the graphic language maps were analyzed to understand how the new adult second-language speakers believed our learning experiences had enabled us to use nuwä abigip. Co-researchers remembered nuwä abigip competencies believed to have been gained though a sequence of strategies, some overlapping, that featured immersion learning complemented by linguistic analysis. Common patterns in language development were explored, especially as they related to learners’ unfolding understanding of the language’s rich morphology. The team concluded the study by reflecting on how the two research methods of dialogic inquiry had aided them in expressing the culmination of their experiences. / Graduate