Learning, identity and classroom dialogue

Abstract

The classroom can be understood as the site of various forms of dialogical interaction. Taken together, engagement in such dialogues results in experiences for students that can impact positively or negatively on their personal and social identities. While the research literature acknowledges this in various ways, there is potential for a research programme more explicitly focused on how different learners respond differentially to classroom situations in terms of their developing identities in the broadest sense. Such a programme could complement life history-based approaches to understanding educational and career trajectories and evaluations of effective teaching based on narrow measures of performativity, by providing microlevel data in the context of a conceptual framework drawn from developmental and/or discursive psychology.