Strand leaders

Literacies, Dialogue and Thinking Strand

This research strand researches literacy as dialogic practice, with a focus on interaction and collaboration. Dialogue is more than just ‘talk’, it is about how we think together: co-constructing and building on ideas, celebrating a diversity of perspectives with tolerance, empathy and inclusion. Dialogue includes critical reasoning and importantly possibility thinking to propose, wonder and imagine together. Pedagogy that embraces these ideas enables children and young people to confidently collaborate in literacy contexts and beyond.

Feature projects

These are some of the projects we are involved in to explore the themes of our strand.

DIALLS

This project is led by Fiona Maine and explores how children build cultural literacy through thinking and talking together . The project was originally funded by a EC Horizon2020 grant and has involved nearly 500 teachers so far!

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Teaching Schools

Thinking Schools @Exeter (TS@Exeter) represents the long-standing engagement with research on teaching for thinking and creativity at the School of Education (SoE) at the University of Exeter

Feature publications

Maine, F. & Čermáková, A. (2022). Thinking Aloud: The role of epistemic modality in reasoning in primary classrooms. Language and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2022.2129979

Kleine Staarman, J., & Ametller, J. (2019). Pedagogical link-making with digital technology in science classrooms: new perspectives on connected learning. In N. Mercer, R. Wegerif, & L. Major (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. London: Routledge.

Maine, F. & Čermáková, A. (2021). Using linguistic ethnography as a tool to analyse dialogic teaching in upper primary classrooms. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2021.100500