Stance-taking in Educational Contexts: Panel

This panel will explore the dialogic act of stance-taking in educational contexts. It aims to offer a forum for researchers interested in dialogue as it relates in and to educational contexts. Drawing on Du Bois (2007), stance can be defined as: “a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimensions of the sociocultural field" (Du Bois, 2007, p.163) The study of stance is important for the field of Education as stance-taking is a public act of self-presentation, knowledge and social judgement. It is how people make perceivable to others their epistemic and attitudinal positions. Educational contexts and educational activity are not necessarily bound by a formal classroom. We welcome papers reporting on research from formal and informal learning environments; learner-generated contexts; outdoor learning contexts; one-to-one tuition; early years, primary, secondary, and higher education contexts; work-study; open learning; health education and others.
Contributors to the panel may wish to focus on linguistic, e.g. stance-markers, questions and answers, and/or non-linguistic resources of stance-taking, e.g. gesture, facial expression, or the use of or switch to different languages. It is anticipated that the topics addressed in this panel will be varied but contributions will share a common ground in the investigation of dialogic acts of stance-taking in an educational context. It is envisaged that the panel will include both empirically and theoretically oriented papers and that contributor and participant discussion will be a prominent feature of this panel.