Designs and affordances for dialogue in Google Classroom: a design-based research study
This project identifies means by which Google Classroom, a digital learning management system (LMS), can support dialogic pedagogy; the ways in which teachers and students explore and generate ideas together through dialogue. Perceptions of convenience and the demand for remote learning solutions, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to the introduction of this suite of digital tools into the lives of millions of students. It is therefore timely for educators to evaluate the potential of this disruptive technology for dialogue, in order to support, develop and potentially transform their practice. A mixed-methods approach was applied to this study, conducted within a participatory design-based research (DBR) framework. The aims were to both identify affordances of Google Classroom, and generate designs, that promote dialogue within it. Practitioners from an independent preparatory school, representing a range of curriculum subjects, were invited to participate as co-researchers in the project. Audiovisual data was collected from 18 lessons with Year 7 (11-12 year old) students between 2017 and 2020. This was analysed using the Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA). 9 student and 7 teacher interviews were also conducted and thematically coded. Affordances of the LMS to support classroom dialogue in the setting included the ability to promote awareness of different perspectives between participants and to foster collaboration and community. Google Classroom also afforded dialogic practitioners the opportunity to further their students’ meta-cognition and inter-subjectivity. The project also identified new spaces within the LMS in which engagement with multiple perspectives, a characteristic of reflective dialogue, can occur. Shared digital artifacts within the LMS represent new spaces in which dialogic space-time can be accessed; their accessibility, immediacy, co-construction and provisionality were the means through which this is possible. Design principles emerged from the DBR process that describe how teachers can design tasks to leverage the digital tools of the LMS to promote a dialogic approach to learning. Whilst context specific, these have user-generalisability and could be modified and applied by practitioners with an interest in promoting dialogue in their own settings, so long as limited numbers of digital devices are available to their students. The joint planning meetings between practitioners in which these heuristics were generated represent a novel model of teacher professional development that might be applied to develop context-specific designs for dialogue within a LMS in similar settings.
Dialogue, Dialogic, Google Classroom, Learning management system, LMS, Design-based research, DBR, Practitioner
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