ABSTRACT
This chapter is about work in progress exploring the relevance of a dialogic pedagogy to schools in both the developed and developing world. Within the teacher development literature, there is general agreement that changing pedagogic practices is difficult because of the strong cultural and social influences which shape teacher assumptions about the purpose of schooling and the nature of the teaching and learning process. While recognizing that teaching is a cultural activity and acknowledging the influence of contextual factors on the teaching and learning process, this chapter will argue that the teaching process and the way pupils learn is much more similar than different across countries and cultures. It will be argued that pedagogy is a transnational response to common circumstances and that in order to address a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic groupings an alternative ‘universalistic’ pedagogy emphasizing a joint teacher–pupil activity and higher-order thinking through a dialogic pedagogy that is sensitive to local conditions, needs to be developed (Tharp and Dalton, 2007)
