Pedagogies for participation: Opening up communicative spaces for productive learning

Learning in primary schools is inherently social; and participating in lessons typically requires participating in practices whereby teachers and students encounter one another as interlocutors, in interaction and in interrelationships (Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer & Bristol, 2014). These practices are fundamental to understanding and enacting pedagogies in classroom learning and teaching. Practices, and so pedagogies, both constitute and are constituted by the particular words used, the particular things done and the particular relationships which exist in the interactions between people. In this teachers and students - as co-participants in dialogues that form the fundamental building blocks of ‘a lesson’ – engage in social transactions that create spaces for learning and teaching. These spaces potentially promote a range of productive interactional (relating), socialising (communicating and participating), and intellectual (knowing) functions. This presentation will show the particularity of the talk moves teachers enact to shape a pedagogy for participation; this is a pedagogy which is dialogic, open, reflexive and explicitly focused on student learning.