Polman's "Dialogic Activity Structures for Project-Based Learning Environments"

Polman, Joseph L. "Dialogic Activity Structures for Project-Based Learning Environments." Cognition and Instruction 22.4 (2004): 431-66.

Examining a project-based learning unit, Polman discovers activity structures at two time scales.  The larger activity structure uses milestone activities: students develop several smaller products and then revise and combine them to produce the final artifact of the project.  In this case, a science teacher’s project completion process included steps such as a research proposal, data collection, and analysis, which pushed students to negotiate scientists’ tasks and provided structure for students’ progress toward their end goal.

The second activity structure, occurring many times each class meeting, is the repetition of several dialogic structures that are less common in traditional classrooms: 1) action negotiation dialogue, in which student and teacher negotiate the next action that should be taken; 2) student questioning dialogue, in which the student initiates the interaction with a question and the teacher responds; and 3) action feedback dialogue, in which the student's action or report of an action evokes feedback from the teacher.  Unlike initiation-reply-evaluation sequences (teacher asks question with an expected answer; students reply with proposed answers; teacher determines correctness of answer), which is good for the transmission model of learning, these student-initiated dialogic structures allow “a teacher to provide active guidance in the practices and norms of the discipline under study…while demanding and enabling students to remain learners with agency rather than passive receptacles”  (462). 

Because both of these structures support Vygotsgy's "general genetic law" that "learners first participate socially in the use of cultural tools and practices and then individually appropriate or 'take up' the tools" (435), it is pedagogically sound to use them in distance learning.  Because of the larger time scale, the first activity structure seems easy to transfer to a distance format, perhaps having students use a blog to present the pieces one at a time and in order, helping them see how the parts will work together when they are revised and combined to form a final product. But creating environments that evoke the individual, informal dialogic interactions is a challenge at a distance.  The key characteristic of these structures is student initiation—students discover through their project work that they need information or guidance, or their independent action shows the teacher that need.  Thus, one step is simply to establish and maintain lines for communication that not only are open but that students perceive as open.  Communicating regularly through individual email may be one way to open communication lines.  Maintaining a presence in students’ online communities (as appropriate) and holding office hours during which the instructor is not only available by phone but logged in to communication programs such as Skype may also help students perceive the instructor as easily accessible.  While these are good steps, to encourage the dialogic activity structures presented here, instructors may need to recreate the classroom environment in which students work independently while the teacher is immediately present and available for spontaneous, student-initiated dialogues. Using tools such as Google Docs, which would allow groups to work together while the instructor monitors them all at once, might allow students to initiate dialogue through the comment or chat features.  Individual work sessions with webcams, mikes, and chat turned on would also allow quick, student-initiated dialogues.  Whether with these tools or others, student empowerment is necessary for project-based learning.