Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education

Theresa F. Lewis is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

In light of current debates over the utility and purpose of public
schooling and the state of instructional approaches to language
learning, the ideas generated in this book provide educators with an
opportunity to make significant changes to the ways that schools provide
education to students.

Wells, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
argues that our understanding of how students think, learn, and are
enculturated into knowing is often more important than the actual
content knowledge presented. He suggests that the work of schools is to
conduct education like a dialogue, interrogating and discovering what is
of interest in each discipline. Given the current rapidly changing
nature of what constitutes curriculum content in schools, his arguments
are particularly relevant. Wells has produced an intelligently crafted
fusion of ideas based on the works of theorists Lev Vygotsky and Michael
Halliday, who both contribute to the field important concepts concerning
the social constructions of knowledge. Intent on articulating the best
that each theorist has to offer, Wells focuses on classroom practitioner
and university researcher alike.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, Wells
offers a comprehensive theoretical background on Vygotsky’s theory of
learning and development and Halliday’s theory of language and its
social uses. While drawing on a range of related sociocultural
perspectives, he discusses the salient aspects of social constructivist
theory—co-construction of knowledge, collaborative communities, and
dialogic inquiry. He promotes these theories “not as a solution but a
powerful tool for mediating further understanding and action.” The
section concludes with one of Wells’s critical propositions that views
knowledge as operational and interactive. He traces the origins of
knowledge creation and how knowledge has historically been produced and
treated in the education context. He then argues for an alternative
perspective that views knowledge as context bound and requiring
co-construction and reconstruction. Classrooms in which teachers and
students are actively pursuing and building knowledge from this view
have drastically different roles to perform.

In the second section, Wells looks at talk and text in the classroom.
He gives an in-depth analysis of classroom discourse in the form of a
case study of an inner-city elementary-school classroom during
successive science lessons. In his examination of classroom discourse,
he makes an interesting observation that challenges traditional opinions
about the “ubiquitous genre of triadic dialogue (Teacher Initiation,
Student Response, Teacher Follow-up).” Of importance in this section
are Wells’ ideas about apprenticeship, teacher talk, student talk, and
their responses to each other in the pursuit of further learning. The
concluding chapter discusses the development of writing and its role in
knowledge construction.

Wells devotes his third and final section to what remains the most
widely referenced, but not necessarily understood, element of
Vygotsky’s work: zone of proximal development (ZPD). Wells’s
description of how ZPD was experienced by teacher researchers,
university researchers, and students provides insights into how broadly
the impact of ZPD may be felt. His overall examination of what ZPD is,
and is not, is meticulous and illustrative.

Dialogic Inquiry offers practitioners and educational researchers
important strategies for conducting ongoing studies on teaching and
learning in the classroom. Linguists, students of Vygotsky and Halliday,
and educators with language learning backgrounds will value the
contribution the book makes. Wells has documented a research approach
that will be of interest to those concerned with producing work that is
simultaneously relevant to the classroom, educational policy, and
research.