Using scenes of dialogue about mathematics with adult numeracy learners - what it might tell us.

How might we characterise the discussion following reading of scenes of dialogue? The idea for this work came from two broad areas, one of which concerns learner-learner interactions and the other concerns the use of participants in verbalising the words of others. A few years ago, I was involved in a project in which discussion of mathematical concepts by learners was a key part of the learning intervention. What interested me was that learner-learner interactions were at times rather minimal. The reports from the sessions contained very few records of learner-learner interactions. A search around learner interactions in the literature produced more teacher-learner interactions than learner-learner. Indeed most of these were concerned with school learners rather than adults, the area which was of most interest to me. A second influence for me began in an observation that I made when attending a research seminar. I had noted that in one session participants were asked to read out the parts of dialogue that were collected in the course of the research. I noted that this appeared to be an effective way of presenting the information. The most obvious aspect of this was that a change in voice appeared to produce a positive difference in delivery with participants actively engaged rather than passive observers. From this, I started to use this approach in my teacher training by asking participants to read the dialogue (and at times narrator aspects) when investigating various literature. In particular, this appeared to work effectively when looking at the work of Jean Lave and others (Lave, Murtaugh and de la Rocha 1984) with adults in the supermarket and with the dialogue scenes written by Lakatos (1976) in Proofs and Refutations (more below).