ABSTRACT
Many educators today advocate for the increased use of dialogue-intensive pedagogy to support student engagement and learning. To explain the pedagogical potential of dialogue, researchers often draw on a sociocultural theory, which views learning as a process of internalization, or appropriation, of ways of speaking, acting, and thinking. However, general principles of this theory provide little guidance as to how dialogue should be implemented in a classroom. As a result, existing instructional models utilize different types of dialogue and various amounts and kinds of teacher support. In this chapter, we describe the assumptions we made about promoting the development of argumentation. We explain our use of inquiry dialogue, in which participants work together toward the goal of reaching the most reasonable conclusion to a contestable question. We then contrast our approach with another model that targets similar educational outcomes but makes different assumptions about the best ways to enact argumentation in a classroom. Our analysis suggests the need for more research efforts to articulate and test specific propositions of sociocultural theories. We argue that there is a need to better understand how features of dialogue and the nature and degree of teacher involvement create distinct experiences for students, thus possibly fostering different learning outcomes.
