Several studies on dialogic pedagogies have contributed to shedding light on how the traditional, authoritative Inquiry-Response-Evaluation (IRE) pattern may be transformed into more open, discursive formats through the inclusion of discursive moves, e.g. questions, that are more "authentic" than others. However, the problem of defining genuine teacher-student dialogue at a discourse sequence level remains open. In this essay, I define this type of dialogue from a cognitive perspective, as a dialogue aimed at fulfilling a sensemaking goal framed in at least three ways: as an individual constructionist, a socio-constructivist, and a socio-epistemological process. I then propose bewilderment, based on the philosophical concept of "critical aporia," as a necessary ingredient of pedagogical teacher-student interactions. These two elements, sensemaking and bewilderment, are then used together as framing indicators of three different profiles of pedagogical dialogues.
The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria.