Antonia Larrain

In a complex, interconnected world in which socio‐scientific problems such as climate change, vaccination, and genetic testing are emerging alongside political polarization and fake news, it is crucial to teach younger generations to critically understand science, imagine possible solutions, and adopt positions that consider different identities and worldviews. To accomplish this, the long tradition of dialogic teaching could be a crucial pedagogical approach. However, despite efforts to promote dialogic teaching, transferring these pedagogies to classrooms has proven difficult, especially in underserved schools. In these contexts, pedagogical innovations are even more challenging, often reinforcing traditional teaching or the belief that dialogic pedagogies are only for upper/middle‐class students. Added to this, narratives of dialogic teaching experiences from the Global South are still scarce. This single case study illustrates in‐depth the process of enacting a South American dialogic design––deliberative teaching––in an underserved science class in Chile. With a mixed design focused on a qualitative narrative of the experience, it addresses the relationship between teacher and researcher, who collaborate on a project of deliberative pedagogy in an 11th‐grade science class. Codification of peer interaction data is presented to complement the case narrative. The study illustrates the complexities of implementing dialogic pedagogies in challenging contexts, and how relationships of collaboration, dialogue, trust, and flexibility were needed to address the pedagogical innovation. It emphasizes that, with enough support, peer dialogue, motivation, and engagement can flourish.

Family therapists, fertility counselors, and professionals working with children and donor‐conceived families may benefit from a deeper understanding of their conversational processes of origin storytelling—particularly the less examined question of how to talk about donor conception. Elaborative reminiscing (Fivush 2019)—a specific conversational style about the past that supports children in developing autobiographical memories and identity—may be especially relevant in this context. Therefore, this study explores how donor‐conceived families talk about origin stories. The sample comprised 45 participants belonging to 17 donor‐conceived Chilean families with children aged between 3 and 8, representing heteroparental, homoparental, and monoparental family structures. Parents recorded naturalistic parent–child conversations in their home setting, which were analyzed using an elaborative reminiscing coding scheme. The results show that these conversations were intimate, mother‐led, brief, co‐constructed, with asymmetrical contributions from parents and children. On average, elaborative turns accounted for 37.5% of the conversation with both parents (43.9%) and children (28.3%) actively contributing. Given children's average age (4.9 years), their degree of elaboration is notable. Three distinct conversational styles emerged: (a) thoughtful and imaginative conversations; (b) narrative conversations with magical elements; and (c) realistic conversations with classic metaphors. These findings suggest that conversational processes may inform the development of interventions aimed at enhancing autobiographical memory and identity development in donor‐conceived children.

In this chapter, I argue for the idea that the unitary view of language, such as the atomistic view held by Locke’s philosophy, has prevented cultural psychology scholars to accept and develop further the idea of mind as language. The thing is that language is not unitary but plural and diverse. Language is not an abstract structure or a transparent medium of communicating minds, but rather a dialogical, historical, and performative process of social encounter, organized through specific and concrete forms, linguistic forms. We do many different things when we speak, and we do many of these different things in the same stream of consciousness. Bakhtin refers to these different social activities that involve typical forms of utterances as speech genres, and each speech genre has its own purpose, audience, interlocutors, compositional style, etc. Speech genres have a political dimension, because they suppose and assume specific speakers and power relationships, and in doing so, they perform power. The interest thread is that there are speech genres for public expression but also for private expression. And here is the core of my argument: different inner speech genres, involving different ways of using language, form and perform different psychological activities. The main argument of the chapter is that the mind is formed and performed by the concrete and situated materiality of inner speech genres. Moreover, the mind unfolds as inner genres. In doing so, the political unfolding of the mind is performed through its generic dimension.

Different studies suggest that collaborative argumentation among peers promotes school learning, especially the comprehension of concepts. However, the available evidence shows that the relationship between argumentation and learning is not direct but instead mediated by development processes that, in turn, promote learning. The goal of this study is to understand the mediating role that the development of argumentative inner speech may play in the process of constructing knowledge through collaborative argumentation. A case study was conducted in which one child (fourth grade) was tracked throughout an entire unit in which he and his peers argued collaboratively class after class. We assessed the students individually before and after in their learning (oral and written) and written argumentation skills. The collaborative work from all the classes was videoed and analysed through discourse analysis. The student showed significant progress in both delayed learning and written argumentation compared to the group. Furthermore, the analysis of oral tests shows that the argumentative interactions that initially appeared in the discussions among peers were internalized so he could understand the concepts involved on an individual level. The article discusses the implications of these results in understanding the role of discursive interactions in school learning processes.

Empirical research indicates that the utilization of argumentation as an educational strategy fosters the acquisition of argumentation skills and disciplinary knowledge. Furthermore, there is evidence to show that argumentation skills development mediates the effect of oral argumentation on disciplinary knowledge. However, studies have also shown that argumentation is scarce in higher education and that although lecturers see argumentation as a relevant pedagogical goal, they think that students need to first acquire knowledge in order to develop argumentation skills. Therefore, a crucial pedagogical resource to promote scientific knowledge in higher education is being overlooked. This paper is aimed at shedding light onto argumentation as a key practice in higher education teaching, disputing the idea that to argue, students first need to acquire knowledge. We elaborate further on Vygotsky’s notion of scientific concepts, highlighting their dialectic structure, which accounts for the epistemic potential of argumentation. This paper extends an invitation to higher education lecturers to prompt argumentation in classrooms as a form of disciplinary learning. Limitations and implications are discussed throughout the paper