This article examines how people learn by actively observing and “listening-in” on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observation and listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings (such as early language learning in the family) in communities that routinely segregate children from the full range of adult activities. However, in the past century some industrial societies have relied on a specialized form of instruction that seems to accompany segregation of children from adult settings, in which adults “transmit” information to children. We contrast these two traditions of organizing learning in terms of their participation structure, the roles of more- and less-experienced people, distinctions in motivation and purpose, sources of learning (observation in ongoing activity versus lessons), forms of communication, and the role of assessment.

There is increasing agreement among those who study classrooms that learning is likely to be most effective when students are actively involved in the dialogic coconstruction of meaning about topics that are of significance to them. This article reports the results of an extended collaborative action research project in which teachers attempted to create the conditions for such dialogue by adopting an inquiry approach to the curriculum. A quantitative comparison between observations made early and late in the teachers' involvement in the project showed a number of significant changes in the characteristics of teacher-whole-class discourse, with a shift toward a more dialogic mode of interaction. Nevertheless, the initiation-response-follow-up (IRF) genre continued to be pervasive. Despite this, when the same observations were examined qualitatively, there was clear evidence of an increase over time in the teachers' adoption of a "dialogic stance." The article concludes with a consideration of the relationship between the choice of discourse formats and the enactment of a dialogic stance.

This article examines how people learn by actively observing and “listening-in” on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observationand listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings (such as early language learning in the family) in communities that routinely segregate children from the full range of adult activities. However, in the past century some industrial societies have relied on a specialized form of instruction that seems to accompany segregation of children from adult settings, in which adults “transmit” information to children. We contrast these two traditions of organizing learning in terms of their participation structure, the roles of more-and less-experienced people, distinctions in motivation and purpose, sources of learning (observation in ongoing activity versus lessons), forms of communication, and the role of assessment.