ABSTRACT
Teachers are all the time teaching about talk. We can't avoid it, since talk is our medium of exchange. When teachers tightly control the flow and the topic of talk, students learn that talk — at least talk in institutions such as schools — is disembodied from the world of meaning. When teachers share control with students, students learn that talk is a means for constructing knowledge. The scary thing is that when students do learn about talk as a vehicle for choice and for negotiating what will be learned, then teachers discover that their classrooms are full of twenty or thirty other teachers. Then you have to rethink what it means to teach. That's the scary thing, and that's the exhilarating thing when you do a good job of teaching your students about talk.
