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In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

This study explores student sensemaking based on the creation and interpretation of sound on a public school bus, operating as a result of a desegregation settlement. To understand these multimodal literacy practices, the authors examined students’ journeys, sonically as passengers in mobile and adult-constructed space.

As a qualitative study, the authors used ethnographic methods for data collection. Additionally, the authors used a design-based research approach to work alongside students to capture and interpret sound levels on the bus.

Findings from this study illustrate how students used sounds as a means to create community, engage in agentic choices and make meaning of their surroundings. Moreover, students used sound as a way around the pervasive drone of the bus itself.

Research implications from this study speak to the need for research approaches that extend beyond visual observation. Sonic interpretation can offer researchers greater understanding into student learning as they spend time in interstitial spaces.

This manuscript illustrates possibilities that emerge if educators attune to the sounds that shape a learner’s day and the ways in which attention to sonic design can create more equitable spaces that are conducive to students’ learning and literacy needs.

This study demonstrates the use of sound as a means of sensemaking, calling attention to new ways of understanding student experiences in adult-governed spaces.

The purpose of this study is to examine how students with workplace learning experience the process of the assessment of prior experiential learning (APEL) in higher education.

This is an inductive and exploratory study drawing on methodology from the field of academic literacies. It addresses two questions: “How do different tutors and students approach the APEL process?” and “How do students with workplace learning experience the APEL process?”. Interviews were undertaken with students and tutors around the students' assessment documents. The data werre analysed according to Lillis' and Ivanič's concept of “addressivity”. This type of analysis indicates how students and tutors are positioning one another, and facilitates the drawing out of similarities and differences in these positionings between the different participants.

The paper finds that, although all students had been successful in their APEL claims, their narratives were quite polarised. Using a heuristic developed by Lillis the data clearly demonstrate the impact on the student experience of two different tutor approaches, that of monologic teaching and dialogic mediation.

This is a small scale, single institution study. Replicating the study in different contexts may further explain the differences between APEL processes that learners find empowering and those which they do not.

The original perspective afforded by the theoretical lens of academic literacies suggests a valuable re‐conceptualisation of the traditional assessor‐candidate relationship with implications for assessment practice. The paper also provides a student perspective on the process that is largely absent in the research literature.

The purpose of this chapter was to describe the development of an early childhood learning network and to understand that development through the lens of complexity theory and trans-organization development. It explores the unfolding dynamics and emerging meaning that became central to facilitating the design, development, and implementation of the complex multi-stakeholder network.

The chapter identifies 12 implications from complexity theory for practitioners of trans-organization development, and then applies those implications to the process and understanding of development stages of an NP’s early childhood education network.

The use of complexity theory as a framework allowed for identifying five key observations and conclusions, in particular the significant role that meaning-making dialogue holds as a driver of common understanding and engagement among stakeholders. Additionally, the use of building responsive processes, understanding contextual shift, impact of power as an attractor pattern, and capacity of flexibility and adaptability all become essential elements of complex network leadership.

The findings of this chapter will help trans-organization development practitioners and leaders alike. Both the implications and lessons learned will assist in building the capacity of leaders and practitioners as a means of improving effectiveness in dealing with emerging dynamics and leading in unknown contexts and complex contexts environments.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.

In this innovative practice paper, we will illustrate how discursive practices of Visual Thinking StrategiesTM (VTS) can foster leadership development capacity of college students. We will show how VTS aligns with constructionist perspectives to post-heroic leadership grounded in discursive approaches to leadership development. This arts-based pedagogy advances leadership development through dialogue and sense-making.

The study begins by defining and conceptualizing Transformative Leadership Conversation (TLC). The conceptualization addresses the meaning of transformation, sensemaking and learning dialogue, and the conversation structures of framing, questioning and listening, and affirming. Next, the authors build a theoretical argument from self-determination theory on the function of TLC. The study concludes with an empirical test of the structure and function of TLC.

There were two parts to the empirical study. First, the authors designed and tested a scale to measure TLC by its structural features (e.g. questioning, listening and affirming language). Second, the authors used a correlational design with ex-post facto data to test the primary assumption that TLC activates autonomous motivation and action. Data came from a random sample of 2,500 teachers in a southwestern state. Useable responses were obtained from 1,615 teachers, for a response rate of 65%.

The empirical tests reveal that the 12-item and 6-item measure of the School Leader Transformative Conversation Scale present valid and reliable evidence on the frequent use of TLC. Consistent with the hypothesized model, TLC had a direct, positive relationship with teacher vitality. It also had a negative relationship with autonomy frustration and a positive indirect effect on teacher vitality by reducing the negative effect of autonomy frustration.

TLC advances a new conceptual lens to study school leadership as a discursive process. The concept opens lines of inquiry that have not yet been examined in school settings.

The use of dialogues within and across organizations is on the rise. This increase is a tacit acknowledgement of the relational foundations from which new meaning is created and social innovations emerge. However, coming together for a dialogue doesn’t assure constructive conversation or transformative engagement. Dialogue participants, even when they are asked to “suspend assumptions,” are generally still embedded in the mental models and familiar frameworks that distance them from one another and prevent real generativity and novelty.

This paper proposes Appreciative Inquiry as an approach particularly conducive to creating public dialogues that are generative and transformative. It suggests that a community is best served by inquiry into strengths, assets and past successes. It further proposes that this mode of inquiry tends to produce positive emotional states, which expand the resources and pro-social inclinations of those in the dialogue. It offers five conditions that support generative and transformative public dialogue and explains how Appreciative Inquiry creates these conditions.