2.3. Dialogic inquiry

responsive, perceptible understanding” (Shotter & Billig, 1998, p. 25) between those involved. Inquiry is a socially negotiated process, requiring both personal and collective meaning-making. Participation in inquiry over time fosters collaborative dispositions and agency as the process moves towards developing understanding that enables “effective and responsible action” (Wells, 2002, p.33).

In designing curriculum, and facilitating curriculum educators should feel comfortable with a division of labour that flattens the hierarchical power relations between educator and participants. Curriculum is not about a rigid process or documentation, but about working towards outcomes that foster deep understanding, agentive learning and action, collaborative approaches to inquiry and developing solutions. These are all ‘big’ outcomes of being a lifelong learner. Once established in a given setting, inquiry processes and stances become established norms (Wells, 2002).

2.3. Dialogic inquiry

For the purposes of this study, dialogical inquiry is based on the map of dialogical inquiry, developed by Stack (2007), Bound (2010) and Stack and Bound (2012). Stack (2007) states that the process of inquiry can be specifically taught. She found that by asking four critical thinking questions in her physics classes, her 16 to 17- year old physics students moved from being educator dependent to owning the inquiry process themselves. When posing these four questions, Stack used an experiential, problematising approach. She asked students to apply the four questions below to the explanations they and others arrived at when solving problems. The four critical questions were:

 Is it intelligible? (What further explanations or experiences can help me understand it?)

 Is it plausible? (How is it convincing, logical, relevant, trustworthy, fit into a bigger picture?

What might be the flaws or limitations?)

 Is it useful? (How does it have greater explanatory or predictive power over other models?

How does it fit into other ways of explaining the world? How is it significant?)

 Is it believable? (What are my underlying beliefs and values about the world and how do these new ideas interact with these?)

These questions not only give rigor to the dialogical inquiry process but deepen the inquiry process; additionally, in using them, students take responsibility for the inquiry process. From watching her students work through these processes, she identified eight aspects of scientific inquiry that drew on and combined the four aspects from Kolb’s learning model (experiencing, reflecting, theorising, applying) with Julia Atkin’s integral learning model (detail, logic, holistic, feeling). All aspects need to be covered in cyclical learning processes to achieve integration of learning.

It was these aspects that Bound and Stack used to further develop Stack’s model into the map of dialogic inquiry by analysing online posts over a 13-week semester for an online module in the Bachelor of Adult and Vocational Education, University of Tasmania (Bound, 2010) (see Figure 2.1). The Map of Dialogic Inquiry is so called because it represents a valuing of dialogue and multiple perspectives to create meaning. The model is intended as a tool to help learners and educators be more aware of the different ways they learn, teach and inquire. The dialogical inquiry map enables people to ‘see’ the different learning aspects they might use when having inquiry conversations. People might see themselves using two or more of these aspects simultaneously or oscillating between them, or moving through different aspects in a more structured way. It is not cyclical, but often people take well-trodden paths, avoiding areas they find difficult. “Good inquiry is likely to visit