by Dr. Margaret Meredith
A quick scan of post-graduate level courses in the UK shows that there is an increasing trend for wholly or mainly online teaching and learning experiences.
This has obvious and well-documented advantages, not least in terms of accessibility from a distance and the efficient use of time. Anecdotally, however, many people express a sense of increased motivation and downright relief at taking part in face-to-face learning encounters. In this blog piece, I will use dialogic theory to consider why this might be, and I will question what the implications are for teaching and learning experiences.
Alexander Sidorkin (1999) writes about three discourses or phases of dialogue. The first is monologic centred on the authority figure. In an educational context this might be the input or presentation of the theme. The second is polythematic, where participants engage in focused discussion around the initial stimulus. Both of these are readily experienced online. Sidorkin’s third phase, however, rarely happens in online learning in my experience. This is the spontaneous or chaotic phase. Participants are free to go ‘off-piste’ and talk about anything they like. This is the sort of conversation that might happen during a coffee and lunch break and is rarely planned as part of the overall learning experience, over and above the need for a pause and some sustenance.
Sidorkin argues that all three types of dialogue and the dynamics involved are a necessary fabric of overall dialogic ecology. Any attempt to temporarily extend one type of dialogue at expense of the others, he argues, puts stress on the participants’ psychological well-being and the quality of their relationships. It is these spontaneous experiences that are so difficult to achieve online, perhaps because in their downtime participants return to being apart from each other. This psychological stress in online learning situations is something I certainly experienced during the pandemic.
Eugene Matusov (2018) uses the metaphor of the ‘free-range chicken’ to describe this third type of dialogue. It is during these encounters that people sometimes report having valuable conversations about their course, their research or difficulties in teaching, which would not have emerged during the more structured types of dialogue. In free-range dialogic pedagogy, Matusov says, the participants can ‘have freedom to move in and out of the interaction, remain silent, change and modify the themes, and engage simultaneously in several activities and agendas’, as we might in that unexpectedly enriching conversation over coffee or travelling on a field trip.
Pedagogical experiences tend to be designed to keep focus and engagement – to promote Sidorkin’s phases one and two. Using the chicken analogy, perhaps greatest thought is put into how to make the battery farming experience the most productive and engaging. Little thought may be given to the ways in which ‘free range’ experiences can be built in. However, spaces and times where people can and will come together in unstructured ways in universities are an important part of the learning experience and are more than ‘non-spaces’ or breaks from the serious work of teaching and learning. They may be intrinsic to it.
So my question is, how might we build in spaces and experiences which release our inner free-range learner?
References
Matusov, E. (2018) Mapping dialogic pedagogy: instrumental and non-instrumental education. In: Rosa, A. and Valsiner, J. eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology. Cambridge University Press, pp. 274-301. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316662229.016
Sidorkin, A. (1999) Beyond discourse: education, the self, and dialogue. New York, State University of New York Press.