About the course

This course is designed for educators who are interested in learning about the foundational theories behind educational dialogue. It is appropriate for educators who are new to educational dialogue as well as for those who wish to refresh their knowledge. The course will facilitate and support educators to explore and evaluate different theories and perspectives on educational dialogue in order to develop their thinking about their own classroom practices.

This course is part of a suite of courses, which are based around some of the (intersecting) main research areas of the CEDiR (Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research) group. CEDiR is a research group within the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge that draws together a range of Faculty colleagues who are interested in educational dialogue and aim to create and share high quality research. You can subscribe to the CEDiR newsletter at the bottom of the CEDiR webpage.

We recommend completing this course prior to engaging in our other Educational Dialogue courses:

  • Course 2: Conducting a Reflective Inquiry
  • Course 3: Supporting your Colleagues through Facilitation

Course creators:

This course was developed by Farah Ahmed and Meaghan Brugha:

Farah Ahmed is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She co-convenes the ‘Cultural, religious and philosophical traditions in educational dialogue’ strand of the CEDiR group. Her current project is: Rethinking Islamic education for British Muslim children: a philosophical investigation of dialogue in Islamic educational theory and an empirical study trialling dialogic pedagogy in UK madrasahs (supplementary schools). Farah is a member of the Teacher Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA) development team and has extensive experience in professional development for dialogic pedagogy and practice.

Meaghan Brugha is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Meaghan is a member of the CEDiR Research group (CEDiR) at the faculty, where she is exploring how technology can afford new forms of dialogue to support the development of a teacher Community of Practice in which practitioners reflect together, support one another, and share practice. Her research draws heavily on the work of T-SEDA, and its impact acceleration project. T-SEDA is an extensive, open resource pack that was designed to support practitioner inquiries and offers customisable coding tools and templates. For full downloadable copies of the pack, scroll to the bottom of the page and choose the language that you want.

Contact details

To get in touch, please email Farah (fa287@cam.ac.uk) and/or Meaghan (meb78@cam.ac.uk)

Contact details for T-SEDA and CEDiR can be found on their websites, as linked above.