ABSTRACT
When we view teaching as a social practice, we are acknowledging that it is not a solo activity. Teaching involves social interaction, that is, communication with others, and is not something a teacher does alone, it is done with students in mind. The dialogue between teacher and student is a social practice and we call this teaching. Teaching is just not set in a social context of the classroom, it is itself a social action. This view of teaching is informed by social views of learning (Bell, 2005a), including: social constructivism (Bell and Gilbert, 1996; Driver et al., 1994); situated learning (Hennessy, 1993; Lave and Wenger, 1991); apprenticeship, guided participation, participatory appropriation (Rogoff, 1993, 1995); distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993); learning in the zone of proximal development, with mediated action (Vygotsky, 1978); (Wertsch, 1991; Wertsch et al., 1995). A fuller review of these is given in Bell 2005a: ch. 3. In these overlapping views of learning, learning is viewed as a purposeful, intentional activity involving meaning making; a situated and contextualised activity; a partnership between teacher and students; and involving the use of language to communicate meaning. Such views of learning do not prescribe a way of teaching; rather, they suggest ways to think about teaching. Social views of learning highlight the use of language and communication in teaching (Bakhtin, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978). Using the theorising of Bakhtin (1986) in an educational context (Roth, 2005; Wertsch, 1991), a teacher is viewed as mindful of the student, whether
Bakhtin (1986) uses also the notion of ‘voice’, meaning the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. Voice is concerned with the wider issues of a speaking subject’s perspective, conceptual horizons, intentions and worldview. It always exists in a social milieu, that is, not in isolation from other voices. Voices produce utterances – a term used by Bakhtin to focus on the situated action of language-in-use, rather than on objects that can be derived from linguistic analytic abstractions. Considering how voices engage with one another is important to a discursive view of mind (Wertsch, 1991), for it is only when two or more voices come into contact (for example, when the voice of a listener responds to the voice of a speaker) that meaning comes into existence (Bakhtin, 1986). In other words, meaning is seen as discursively constructed by two people in dialogue, meaning more than one voice. Hence, when a speaker produces an utterance, at least two voices (those of both the speaker and the listener) are heard simultaneously, as the speaker has addressivity. A dialogic philosophy is said to emphasise ‘ontological notions of becoming and draws attention to forms of validity that are constructed within the community in which the dialogue takes place’ (Whyte, 2010: 6). Hence, the idea of ‘constructed’ meanings brings with it a constructionist or relativist ontology. No distinction is made between language and any assumed underlying, internal, static mental states and processes such as cognition. In this non-mentalist ontology, the social actions are the cognitive processes. Thoughts reside in the uses we make of public and private systems of signs (including languages and symbols). To be able to think is to be a skilled user of these sign systems. Whilst not denying the existence of a ‘reality’ of the brain and its functioning, there is a denial of the value of separating language and thinking. In this view, knowledge claims are seen as socio-historical and political, and words are seen as having no objective meaning outside the social and relational contexts in which they are used:
Language is viewed as reflexive and contextual, constructing the very nature of the objects and events as they are talked about. This emphasises the constructive nature and role of language . . . As people are engaged in conversation with others, they construct and negotiate meanings, or the very ‘reality’ which they are talking about. (Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 266)
For example, a teacher wishing to understand the learning by two science students doing practical work in the school laboratory needs to make sense of the social talk between the two students as they discuss, for example, why bubbles are coming off only one of
Student: Femur.
