Primary School Teachers and Students’ experiences of Dialogic Teaching in Timor Leste

Abstract

The rationale for this study is to examine the extent to which teachers and students in different contexts, namely two international schools and one Catholic school in Timor Leste, use the principles of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2004) in their interactions with each other during class discussions. The success of teacher development in dialogic teaching has been patchy (Hennessy & Davies, 2020), so it is important to continue to examine teachers’ beliefs across different countries and contexts on dialogic teaching to contribute to the explanations as to why the uptake of dialogic teaching has been slow. Wegerif (2018) stated that real learning would happen when teachers provided students with dialogic space that allowed them to explore, develop and share new ideas with others. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to observe whether teachers in Timor Leste across the different contexts are familiar with dialogic teaching and the extent to which they allow for dialogic space. The study include participation from nine teachers, and 15 students. The study involved observation using the Teacher Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA) from Cambridge University and semi-structured interviews with 15 students and the nine teachers. The interviews were transcribed and thematic coding was used to present the data. There were six themes that were identified from the interviews for the teachers and five themes for the students. The key finding for the teachers was that the varied designs of the curriculum and the expectations from the Education Ministry for the delivery of the curriculum did not impact on the teachers’ belief about dialogic teaching. The context of their teaching did not appear to have an impact on whether or not they held a dialogic stance or not. However, there were varied results for the students. The students in the international school were mostly able to articulate dialogic teaching and used this in their class discussion, whereas students in the Catholic school had little understanding of dialogic teaching and did not use the principles in their class discussion, despite their teachers taking a dialogic stance. It appeared that the macro hierarchical nature of schooling in Timor Leste proved to be a bigger influence on the students than their teacher holding a dialogic stance.