Actor-Network Theory as a New Direction in Research on Educational Dialogues

Abstract

The analysis of educational dialogues has been traditionally undertaken according to pre-given coding schemes, which are often teacher-centered, and in which multiple time scales are not considered. In this paper, we consider the use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) methodology. While ANT has already been used in education, its application for analyzing the deployment of educational dialogues over time is novel. We analyze some educational dialogues in a program dedicated to dialogic pedagogy. We show that ANT enables us to consider the observation of educational dialogues as the formation and dissolution of networks between humans and non-humans, where roles are not pre-determined but translated in interactions, and the educational design of instructions is black-boxed.