Dialogic Teaching and Learning in Mathematics Education

Definition

Dialogic teaching and learning refers to certain qualities in the interaction between teachers and students and among students. The qualities concern possibilities for the students’ involvement in the educational process, for establishing enquiry processes, and for developing critical competencies.

Characteristics

Sources of Inspiration

There are different sources of inspiration for bringing dialogue into the mathematics classroom, and let me just refer to two rather different.

The notion of dialogue plays a particular role in the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. He sees dialogue as crucial for developing literacy, which refers to a capacity in reading and writing the world: reading it, in the sense that one can interpret sociopolitical phenomena, and writing it, in the sense that one becomes able to make changes.

With explicit reference to mathematics, the crucial role of dialogue can be argued with allusion to Imre Lakatos’ presentation in Proof and Refutations (Lakatos 1976)....