21st Century Learners

Relationship educates

As they put to sea at the beginning of a new academic year, here’s a maxim that educators everywhere might like to hold tight to: relationship educates.

Relationship educates. Thanks for the truism! Relationship educates? What does that even mean? I came across the phrase while reading Kenneth Kramer’s ‘Learning through Dialogue’ in which he reflects on the relevance of Martin Buber’s teachings to modern education. Buber, an Austrian-Jewish scholar of the early to mid-twentieth century best known for his work ‘I and Thou’, believed that it is not the teacher alone, but the lived relationship between the teacher, the student and the text (the material to be studied) that educates.

Introduction

In the previous post I described dialogic pedagogy as involving teachers and students talking and thinking in a way that seeks out and values different perspectives, and uses them to develop understanding. The broad term ‘dialogic pedagogy’ encompasses diverse approaches to its enactment in the classroom. Notable approaches include Professor Robin Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching; Thinking Together as developed by Professor Rupert Wegerif, Professor Neil Mercer and Dr Lyn Dawes; Professor Lauren Resnick’s Accountable Talk; Roger Sutcliffe’s Philosophical Teaching and Philosophy for Children (P4C) as developed by Professor Matthew Lipman. Follow the links or see the bibliography to find out more about them.

In this short series of posts, I want to explore what dialogic pedagogy is, why it might be valuable and how a classroom teacher or school might get started with it. It’s written in part to help me to clarify my own thinking (or at least to keep me thinking!) during the lockdown, though I do hope others will find it interesting and useful too. Any feedback would be most welcome.