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The purpose of this chapter is to gain a deeper understanding about the second of four aspects of Western Melbourne Roundtable action—dialogic action. The intention is to extend the exploration of Roundtable action begun in Chapter 5 by focusing on

aspects of Roundtable communication which were connected to case writing— storytelling and listening, writing and reading cases, and case-inspired conversations. In the exploration of contextual action it was argued that Roundtable members

adopted an inclusive attitude and in doing so created a scale of spaces for professional learning (case writing, teams, a Roundtable and networks) which encouraged and supported expression, interaction and cognition. It was further argued that by adopting this kind of attitude and acting contextually the Roundtable not only achieved

connectivity for Roundtable participants but also set the scene for engagement which was intimate, cooperative and creative. Each of these aspects of Roundtable action are depicted below in Figure 5: Connecting contextual and dialogic action.

contextual intimate connective creative personal cultural societal Quality of engagement cognitive interactive expressive inclusive Basic attitude Democratic action connected by the threads of teaching life dialogic cooperative

Figure 5: Connecting contextual and dialogic action The examination of dialogic action in the Roundtable will be achieved by investigating the connection between contextual action and dialogic action and seeking to understand the basic attitude and the quality of engagement evident in this second dimension of action.

The literature indicates that dialogue is significant in building relationships (Giddens, 1999), achieving reconciliation (Arendt, 1958), reaching understanding (Habermas, 1984; MacIntyre, 1999) and making way for new beginnings (Arendt, 1958).

Habermas believes that those who wish to achieve a deeper understanding, which he sees as the principal goal of communication, must have the ability to participate in argumentation, enjoy the mutuality of shared grounds and participate in a community of the communicatively competent (Braaten, 1996:141). Habermas further argues that in order to act communicatively and participate in the process of reaching

understanding:

The speaker must choose a comprehensible (verständlich) expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true (wahr) proposition…so that the hearer can share the knowledge with the speaker. The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully (wahrhaftig) so that the hearer can believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right (richtig) so that the hearer can accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with one another (Habermas, 1996b:119).

More recently, Habermas (1999:140), seeking a model for deliberation and decision- making, has argued for a procedural democracy which is achieved by ‘weaving together pragmatic considerations, compromises, discourses of self-understanding and justice’. In this context he suggests the need to focus on the rules of discourse and the forms of argumentation. These ideas, and the interpretations and challenges

articulated by others provide a framework for seeking to understand the space, form and characteristics of dialogic action in the Western Melbourne Roundtable. Many Roundtable documents contained references to communication in the

Roundtable—the cases and the minutes of Roundtable Steering Committee meetings portrayed the dialogic experiences as they were happening. The collaborative

interviews conducted by and for the Links teams in 1996-97 looked back, in an evaluative way, at the case writing activity. Finally, Roundtable members who participated in the individual interviews conducted during 2001 as part of this project identified case writing as a key aspect of Roundtable activity. Their insights formed the basis for the document Chris’ reflections on case writing (Appendix 8: Chris’

interview/structured conversation which was conducted in 2002. These interviews provided a third and more distant reflection on the dialogic activities of the

Roundtable. While it was with mixed feelings that members of the Western

Melbourne Roundtable adopted case writing as a central activity, by the end of the project, and now five years on, there is no doubt that this ambivalence was replaced by a shared enjoyment of, and commitment to, the case writing process. The detail presented in this chapter shows that case writing, as interpreted by the Roundtable, featured dialogue which was meaningful because it was contextually connected, cooperative and promoted both intimate and creative engagement.

Dialogic flow

The first step in gaining a deeper understanding about dialogical action is achieved through an examination of dialogic flow. As described in Chapter 5, case writing was the central aspect of dialogic action in the Western Melbourne Roundtable. It was adopted by the Roundtable following a seminar conducted by Judith Shulman, and the university colleagues who attended the session believed the strategy might be

appropriate for collaborative research. Case writing promised both support for and documentation of local investigations into innovation in teaching and learning. Participants anticipated identifying critical incidents, revealing details of practice, discussing issues raised, making decisions about future action and documenting action research. Because case writing was central to Roundtable activity the connection between case writing and dialogic action is of paramount importance in the context of this chapter. However, case writing was preceded by storytelling and listening.

Storytelling and listening

For action and speech…are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation many appear to be (Arendt, 1958:97).

The Roundtable members found that just talking was important. The first aspect of what Braaten (1996) might call communicative competence was oral storytelling. Within the Roundtable, dialogic activity began with storytelling and during this study it was mentioned repeatedly and fondly. While there was an expectation that cases

would be written and so become a focus for discussion, the importance of simply telling and listening to stories was not anticipated and certainly not articulated in any of the early Roundtable documents. Teresa, who had recently returned from family leave, thought that teaching was

…a bit like being a mother, you know, you just do it instinctively. I s’pose what this project made us do was verbalise it, that’s what we had to do.

Prue, a teacher at Primary School, expressed the view that it was the talk which was important and whether people wrote or not was an optional next step. Olga recalled:

Well, when I was first involved we used to find it was a really good time just to talk about things. You never have time just to sit back and talk about things in a small group where you can interact and just talk about your own experiences with teaching, with working with other teachers and that kind of thing. So I just found it a good time to get things off my chest or just ask, just to listen to other people. I guess I just kept doing it that way just for the talking but it was just a time where we didn’t have to worry about the routine of the classroom or the work you had to do, you could just sit back and talk about things that were going on in the school.

Nias and her colleagues (1989:79) argue that ‘chat’ is a high-level activity. In reporting their study of staff relations in primary schools they note that in schools with a collaborative culture

…staff spent a great deal of time talking to one another and that their

conversations were usually a mixture of chat about themselves and discussion of their teaching…everyday talk was the medium through which shared meanings first evolved and then were continuously and implicitly reinforced.

The significance of chat was also felt in the Roundtable and members of teams noted the new space for talking and listening. Dora contrasted the new opportunities with a memorable day when she had felt worn out, frustrated, ‘annoyed in a big way’ and all she had received in response to expressing these emotions to a colleague was the

While teachers were used to telling stories about their work in informal situations— around the staffroom table, in the passageway, in the car park—as the teams got going they soon realised that the Roundtable was distinctive because it created a particular space and time to talk. Storytellers found that talking to their Links team colleagues enabled them to say things that they would have been too scared to say in the

staffroom. They compared the Links opportunity with past circumstances where they had not relished the chance to talk and had been unlikely to turn to their colleagues, instead ‘keeping it all within’, ‘suffering in silence’, and feeling like they had to find a way to deal with a problem for fear that others would see them as incompetent.

Arendt (1958:50) argues that bringing things into the public realm ‘assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves’ and teachers in the Roundtable noticed that once they began to talk, reflect and think together about context-related issues, problems and questions, the things that did and didn’t work, it relieved the stress. ‘Like a drink’, Dora noted.

Those who participated in local team meetings valued telling and listening and in this way a discourse of self understanding (Habermas, 1984) became systematic and public (Stenhouse, 1975:156–7). Teachers were aware that they rarely had a chance to speak to other teachers about specific things that happened at work and that when time was not allocated for talking it was a strain to find it. Therefore when they

received the Innovative Links Project money32 it not only became possible to buy time for talking but it indicated that others thought this was important work. The local teams of colleagues who exchanged stories were exactly the kind of groups that MacIntyre saw as providing a context for genuine thought—‘small face-to-face conversational groups who pursue their enquiries systematically’ (MacIntyre, 1999:251).

Even when teachers recognised the unique opportunity to talk they were still challenged by the barriers. Frida, reflecting on the Eagle Secondary College experience recalled:

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…The meetings we had were always very interesting because we got to talk about educational issues that didn’t…come up very often when talking together at other times, however they always seemed like a bit of a pressure because it was something extra to do in the working day rather than something that seemed genuinely part of what you were doing.

Picking up on another challenge, Moore (1995) reported the problem of interrupting normal day-to-day school arrangements, especially when teachers were committed to building a community of learners in the classroom and knew that to leave the group was a threat to the stability which was such an important ingredient in their work together. As Bill observed:

What’s always been a tension…is just the sheer physical thing of leaving...the students to go to meetings…No matter if there was financial remuneration for it or whatever because our experience has been that if we are not with our kids then bloody mayhem can

ensue…We tried to find ways of overcoming that. One of the

suggestions was that we (might)…tag a designated CRT33 teacher for the year. That was the intention, it never happened, we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t get anyone. It was just a bloody joke. I really reckon that is an important consideration…

And Eleni noted the day-to-day interruptions:

…we could easily get lost…Everyday things happen at the school— someone’s got the wrong school shoes on—and suddenly they become more important. Rather than sitting down and writing…your day gets filled up with the small things and you don’t have time for the big ones.

Threats to the dialogic space varied from one person, one team and one school to the next and given the observations about finding a space for telling and listening it was not surprising that Eleni observed ‘half of us don’t even think about our practice let

alone write about it’. But it was worth taking up the challenge and developing this aspect of communicative competence because talking, telling stories and listening seemed to be a rehearsal for writing and reading cases.

Writing and reading cases

Writing cases to be shared with colleagues defies several norms embedded in the culture of teaching as work. The first is writing. Teaching is a ‘doing’ profession. In my experience working with teachers…I find many resistant to writing about their work. Writing requires time—a precious rare commodity for most teachers. It also requires having something to write about and a way of thinking that is typically not part of the professional training of teachers (Shulman, 1992:156).

The Roundtable had created a space for dialogue, the stories seemed to be flowing and it was in this context that case writing and reading became the second kind of dialogic activity within the Roundtable. It was the written version of telling and listening; in fact many people referred to case writing as though it was spoken and reading as though it was listening. Inge, who had attended the Shulman workshop and

subsequently incorporated case writing into many aspects of her work, observed that case writing

…is a wonderful way of professionals speaking and listening to each other whether they are school teachers or workplace trainers or paramedics who do training as part of their work…it is a wonderful way for them to talk to each other.

But case writing and reading also differed from telling and listening and teachers realised they had adopted an activity which encapsulated their experiences, opinions and feelings. Rosita contrasted talking and writing:

I think it is very easy to have discussions, but the words aren’t there, they’re not solid, you can’t see them, you can’t hear them again if you want to. So writing things down freezes that moment and your ideas and thoughts at that time and even though they date—like when I look back and think oh my goodness—it helps you to mark things, mark

milestones or time, you know what I mean. And you can say, yeah, that was where I was at the time.

In this different expressive space teachers observed a shift from something that could be construed as ‘just having a chat or a whinge’ to recorded stories and as with the telling, teachers felt reassured by the activity, this time with an added sense of

professionalism. However, talking continued to have a significant role because it was through talking and telling that cases emerged and the importance of this connection between stories and cases was another aspect of communicative competence.

For some Roundtable members it was difficult to take the step from talking to writing. Steve observed that in most instances teachers commenced the writing of a case ‘only after intense description and analysis of a practical situation with colleagues.’ He recalled one such occasion at Kingfisher Primary School:

I’m sitting down having a cup of coffee because there is a meeting coming and Kylie rushes into the staffroom. She’s looked at me, said ‘Wait there!’, rushed back and got some kid’s work, shown me this kid’s work and excitedly told me about how this kid had actually put pen to paper for the first time and had made this leap, this learning leap. I said ‘Would you like to write a case?’ and she just sat down, there and then, and wrote a case. Fifteen minutes and she had a page of writing. Done. And it was a very powerful time, and it described an important moment in this teacher’s life.

When a couple of teachers at Eagle Secondary College could not think of anything to write Anna took them out for a coffee and as they talked she scribed. After 45 minutes they stopped and looked at the record of the conversation—three hours later one of the teachers had written a seven page case. It seemed that teachers had to ‘visit’ their practical consciousness before they could achieve a discursive consciousness

(Giddens, 1984:41–5 and 374–5). At Rosella Primary School Peter noted:

It’s really hard because initially you have to really make a conscious effort to see what’s around you because unless somebody asks you a question sometimes you don’t really see what’s happening … you’re so

busy with the day-to-day stuff that you kind of have to stop, look back and think…

Janine also described how hard it was to identify what was important when you were in the middle of things. She recalled wondering what to write about.

I used to think of a lot of things and think they are probably only trivial but if you go back and think about them now you think no they were important things. I think there was a lot more that I could have written on or could write on now or that I probably rejected.

The time needed to take the step from storytelling to case writing varied from one person to the next. For some it seemed easy yet for others it was a six month struggle. For the latter group, when a topic suddenly emerged and they got down the first line it seemed easy, the story just came out and they found they could write and write. At Rosella Primary School the teachers tried to focus their work by sitting around a table together reading cases written by people in other professions. As they reviewed the cases each person interjected with stories and experiences indicating there were many stories to be told. Having identified a story some teachers stumbled again, doubting whether their stories were good enough to share, often needing reassurance before making their stories public. As Olga recalled:

…I was the Link person in the school at the time, and (a teacher) would show (a case) to me and say ‘Do you think this is worthwhile taking to the group?’ and I’d say ‘Well anything you want to tell us is

worthwhile’. And that gave them a little bit more confidence…I felt the same way as that person when I showed my first case to Steve, and that was the response that I got and so I passed it on.