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Article of Volume 9, Issue 2, June 2014

Disengaged students and dialogic learning: The role of CSCL affordances

Authors: Benzi Slakmon, Baruch B. Schwarz

Abstract: Only a few studies have dealt with the challenge of bridging the linguistic gap between the dialogic realm and the talk of disengaged students. Bridging this gap is particularly relevant to the CSCL community since one of its utmost aims is to promote the dialogic. This study aims to articulate how to harness the CSCL design and affordances to enhance dialogic pedagogy with disengaged students. Using temporal analysis of philosophical discussions for children, we focus on three disengaged 8th grade students participating in successive discussions mediated by a CSCL tool (Argunaut), and follow the way they talk with their peers in the classroom. The study shows the gradual emergence of the dialogic among those students. We describe the transition of their talk moves, from initially reproducing the way they talk to adopting dialogical norms. To explain this we conceptualize the notion of carriers of discursive norms and discuss its transformative role in dialogue. The dialogic transition was made possible by the pedagogical design and the design of the CSCL tools. These affordances allowed the students change the meaning of the conversational building blocks of space, silence, addressee, and the ethics of talk.

Keywords: Disengaged students, Dialogic pedagogy, Technology affordances, Discursive norms, Philosophy for children, Voice

Citation: Slakmon, B. & Schwarz, B. B. (2014) Disengaged students and dialogic learning: The role of CSCL affordances. ijcscl 9 (2)

DOI: 10.1007/s11412-014-9191-x

Preprint: slakmon_schwarz_9_2.pdf

About this article at link.springer.com [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11412-014-9191-x] including a link to the official electronic version.