Dialogic RE: Oracy for the 21st century
Written by: Antony Luby
8 min read
‘It is our hope… to improve the amount and quality of oracy teaching in British schools, so that young people are better prepared for life in the 21st century.’
((Mercer et al., 2017), 2017, p. 17)
So writes Neil Mercer, emeritus professor at Cambridge University and a researcher at the forefront of oracy pedagogy. This paper gives an insight into a dialogic approach to RE that addresses Mercer’s call to better prepare students for 21stcentury living.
This dialogic RE develops students’ reasoning by promoting two types of talk: cumulative talk (consensus building) and exploratory talk (constructive criticism). Reasoning is made visible as students try to create trust and achieve consensus through cumulative talk, whereby they ‘…build positively but uncritically on what the other has said’. This is a prerequisite to exploratory talk, in which the students ‘…engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas’ (Mercer, 1995, p. 104). In the world
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This article was published in May 2018 and reflects the terminology and understanding of research and evidence in use at the time. Some terms and conclusions may no longer align with current standards. We encourage readers to approach the content with an understanding of this context.
A very interesting read