Dialogic Teaching and the Architecture of Hybrid Learning Spaces: Alexander Meets Alexander

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore some ideas about hybridity, language and reconfiguration using a case study of pre-service teachers (PST) enrolled in initial teacher education. The course in question prepares teachers for teaching English in primary schools. Its ethos is strongly influenced by Robin Alexander's principles of dialogic teaching. Our case analysis examines dialogic learning activities flowing across multiple hybrid spaces, including spaces being rapidly reconfigured in response to the Covid-19 lock-down. In one example, we map the students' activities across hybrid spaces constituted by their "lock-down" home-working sites and Zoom rooms. We show how these activities involved the take-up of various digital, material and hybrid tools and artefacts, in small group and whole class work, choreographed to make an intense, productive and enjoyable synchronous session. In a second example, we show how some travelling artefacts created by primary school children - letters in which they wrote about their reading preferences - became important resources for the PST across a semester. The letters provided scaffolding for the PST's learning, also supporting the evolution of their working relationships and the collaborative formation of professional identity. Individual analysis and small group discussion of these letters promoted the development of shared understandings of important aspects of the teaching of reading and writing. The university students wrote back to the primary school children and their class teachers, completing the loop and realising a hybrid learning space that stretched across homes, the primary schools and the university, as well as the imagined worlds created in and by books. In analysing each of these examples, we draw upon the work of the architect Christopher Alexander, who helps us think more clearly about connections between valued activities and the design of hybrid learning spaces.