Pedagogy as Dialogic Relationship: Fostering Cosmopolitan Teacher Identities

Abstract

In light of the transformed nature of international education and Australian Universities' increasing reliance on international student enrolments, it is imperative that learning environments are designed to facilitate the development of students' intercultural understandings so they may fluently and flexibly move and deal with these new conditions - with transnational and local diversity – to develop 'cosmopolitan' identities (Luke, 2004). To achieve this, carefully constructed pedagogies are required which privilege diversity and facilitate the interanimation of the diverse voices that students, teachers and texts bring to classroom interactions. This chapter reports on a research study which considers the challenge of developing a collaborative learning environment with and for a diverse group of both international and domestic postgraduate students. Informed by a sociocultural approach to learning which views pedagogy as a dialogic relationship (Halasek, 1999), this study analyses the implementation of a pedagogical model, Collective Argumentation (Brown and Renshaw, 2000), designed to enhance dialogicality, harness diversity and promote inclusivity