Teacher educators using cogenerative dialogue to reclaim professionalism

Teacher education is a space that is constantly in flux as it responds to the increasing requirements of governments to improve the quality of teachers and teaching in specific and measurable ways. The burden of this work falls to academic staff who then must balance their engagement with research, teaching and service within a higher education sector that has a different set of measures and requirements. Against this background, we (authors) have aimed to identify ways to work together to reclaim our professionalism as teacher educators. This chapter recounts one of our experiences as three teacher educators from different parts of Australia and our use of cogenerative dialogue (interactive social space for dialogic exchange) that included material objects to support our collaboration. Vygotsky’s conception of individual cognition being connected to social interactions and speech provided a theoretical context for our explorations. Using metalogue as our methodological approach, we document how using material objects during cogenerative dialogue allowed us to reflexively consider possible ways to improve our practice of research and teaching. The implications of this self-study identify the importance of cogenerative dialogue to support teacher educators to reclaim their identity and academic agency as professionals in an era of measurement

Exploring the complexities of children’s inquiries in science: Knowledge production through participatory practices

Beginning with the assumption that young children are capable of producing unprecedented knowledges about science phenomena, this paper explores the complexities of children’s inquiries within open-ended investigations. I ask two central questions: (1) how can we (teachers, researchers, and children themselves) use and build upon children’s explorations in science in practice? and (2) what pedagogical approaches can position children as experts on their experiences to facilitate children’s sense of ownership in the process of learning science? Six vignettes from a Kindergarten classroom are analyzed to elaborate the central claim of this work, which is that when children are engaged in collaborative open-ended activities, science emerges from their interactions. Open-ended structures allowed for teachers and children to facilitate further investigations collaboratively, and participatory structures mediated children’s representations and explanations of their investigations. Evidence of children’s interactions is used to illustrate the complexities of children’s explorations, and pedagogical approaches that create the spaces for children to create knowledge are highlighted