Learning Together

Solidly grounded in theory and empirical evidence, this book presents a novel methodological framework for fostering Communities of Dialogic Inquiry in primary education called Learning Together . These communities create collaborative networks of distributed cognition among school, university, and local community members to equip “apprentices” with a firm scientific foundation, complemented by a robust humanistic citizenship culture, enabling their participation in socioscientific practices in an informed, critical, responsible and inclusive fashion. Learning Together provides concrete, articulated, and richly illustrated teaching-learning strategies for cultivating these communities in diverse school and community settings. “In this book, the authors make a distinctive, strong and important contribution to our understanding of how education can be made most productive. They draw on a wealth of schools-based research, including their own, to link what is known about the ways humans learn and what can and should happen in classrooms. It should help to promote a more accurate conception of education as a social, cultural, communicative activity, rather than a process whereby teachers simply transmit knowledge to students. I hope it is read by teachers, researchers and others involved in education everywhere”. – Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, UK “For the authors of this fascinating and timely volume, communities of dialogic inquiry have two main aims: fostering skills that support a key human activity (learning for dialogue) and applying those skills in knowledge acquisition (learning through dialogue). The authors ground those aims in a novel yet convincing interpretation of sociocultural theory: the insightful and wide-ranging literature review that underpins their approach will be appreciated by researchers and practitioners alike. At the same time, the volume goes far beyond theory: it concludes with case studies, which indicate in detail how dialogic inquiry can be embedded in classrooms”. – Christine Howe, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge, UK