Dialogism for a research-practice partnership for character citizenship education
Project ID: OER 03/22 PAJ
Subject area: Character and Citizenship Education
Principal Investigator: Dr Andrew Joseph Pereira
Email: andrew.pereira@nie.edu.sg
About the project
This research conceptualizes a novel dialogic research-practice partnership (RPP) model to investigate a vexing education problem in the form of making the Citizenship Character Education (CCE) curriculum meaningful and significant to the students in Singapore schools. While university researchers and schoolteachers have been partnering in school research, little has been studied in terms of partnership for CCE purposes and fewer have employed philosophical concepts like dialogism as a guiding philosophy.
This project seeks to empirically investigate the nature of the instructional core into how teachers teach the way they do for CCE while demonstrating the possible benefits arising from a close and dialogic partnership through researchers and teachers’ joint design and planning of content and learning tasks that attempts to strengthen and enhance collaboration through democratic equity while harnessing partnership synergies. A rethinking of RPP is necessary in avoiding hierarchy issues and top-down imposition of agendas while fostering mutualistic collaborations to investigate problems of practice and solutions. The overall objective is to engender dialogic learning within action research and to equip educators in a partnership framework to create schools that best serve all students, families, and communities.
While the dialogic partnership is informed by literature it will be further refined through experiential testing by way of Freirean dialogic culture circles defined as collectives to investigate previously inconspicuous phenomena for explicit awareness. The dialogic partnership model seeks to empower teachers by ensuring that crucial partnership aspects are discussed and agreed through democratic processes. Its dialogic principles underpinning the model also serves as an exemplar for enacting dialogic learning in the classroom. Strategically, the dialogic circle also serves as a springboard for teacher action research as professional practice with the research team providing theoretical support, guidance, and resources. Through a dialogic process at deriving an action research plan, the aim is to engender practical wisdom in teachers’ ability to judge or discern what can be changed in a particular set of circumstances to effect improvements.
This dialogic partnership model empowers teachers as researchers of their own practices to give them control over what is to count as knowledge about their practice with the support from researcher collaborators. Such professional wisdom is also a realization of an ideal way of life as well as an actualization of ethical qualities expressed with the appropriate form of action that also requires continuous self-reflection and analysis. As CCE presents its unique consideration given that teachers are tasked to prepare students to navigate the complexities of today’s fast-changing social paradigm both online and offline, the conceptualization of a novel and dialogic research-practice framework is advantageous in drawing upon different forms of expertise to contribute to different communities of practice. Such a partnership framework is also of local and international relevance especially stemming from its inherent inter and cross-disciplinary collaborations with different stakeholders.
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