Exploring dialogic education used to teach historical thinking within the cultural context of East Asia: A multiple-case study in Taiwanese classrooms

Abstract

Empirical evidence suggests that dialogic education is an effective way to develop students' higher order thinking and reasoning skills. In history education, curriculum goals share these aims, especially in Taiwan's latest national curriculum reform. It is then important to explore whether and how dialogue is being used to this end in history classes and the form that dialogic education takes in this East Asian cultural context. This study explored the features of Taiwanese teachers' talk and how it was used to teach historical thinking. Video recordings were made of a total of 6 lessons by three high school teachers. Descriptive statistics of word frequency of teachers' discourse using Nvivo (v.12) in complement with fine-grained qualitative analysis of whole class dialogue from a sociocultural perspective shed light on the various discursive strategies that the teachers used to facilitate students' historical reasoning. Findings suggest that some prominent features in Taiwanese teachers' talk include the hybrid use of monologue and dialogue and the hybrid of short-term and long-term dialogue for teaching historical thinking and reasoning. This study contributes significantly to the theoretical discussion of dialogic education for history classes in the East Asian cultural context. Moreover, it has practical implications for how teachers could use this hybrid form of talk to introduce the elements of historical thinking to students. Limitations of the study are also discussed at the end of the article.