Higher Education Research & Development

Vol. 28, No. 1, March 2009, 45–57

Dialogue and team teaching

Ann Game* and Andrew Metcalfe

School of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia
(Received 30 August 2006; final version received 21 September 2007)
Taylor and Francis
CHER_A_344603.sgm

Higher
10.1080/07294360802444354
0729-4360
Original
Taylor
102008
28
a.game@unsw.edu.au
AnnGame
000002008
&
Education
Article
Francis
(print)/1469-8366
Research &(online)
Development

Although dialogue is a common word in educational theory, its full significance is

diluted if it is seen as a matter of exchange or negotiation of prior intellectual
positions. In fact, the dia- of dialogue indicates through: dialogue moves through
participants and they through it. Dialogue allows participants to have thoughts
they could not have had on their own, yet to recognise these thoughts as
developments of their own thinking. On this understanding of dialogue, education
is a transformative rather than simply accumulative process. Similarly, team
teaching is often thought to involve no more than the summative logic of sharing
loads and adding perspectives. In dialogic pedagogy, however, team teaching
refers to the way that the supportive relationship between teachers opens
opportunities for students to join the team as teachers. Although teachers and
students have different responsibilities, all learn through a collective dialogue. The
article draws on our practice of dialogic team teaching large first-year classes.
Keywords: dialogue; feedback; holding space; patience; team teaching

Introduction
Dialogic pedagogy begins with the paradox that teaching is an impossible project. No
matter how determined or knowledgeable they are, teachers can, as independent
agents, teach students little or nothing. The role of teachers is only carried to fruition
when students act, grow and learn. Rather than an action that one person performs for
or on another, teaching is what teacher and student do together. By the same logic,
learning is also a collaborative exercise and, moreover, a necessary element of teach-
ing. Real learning, like real teaching, occurs in the dialogue that constitutes the meeting
of teacher and student (see Felman, 1982).
People often assume that the di- in dialogue refers to two parties, in contrast to the
one party of a monologue. The corollary of this conventional view of dialogue is that
it is based on a variety of exchanges between two prior and identifiable positions –
that is, it arises from interaction, competition, opposition and the reconciliation of
positions. In fact, however, the dia- of dialogue indicates through. As Bohm (1985)
puts it, dialogue implies ‘a new kind of mind’ that carries and is carried by the partic-
ipants: the dialogue moves through them and they through it. Dialogue is not located
in any or even in all of the individual participants, but rather in a whole that is incom-
mensurable with the sum of the finite parts. Thus, Merleau-Ponty (1974) argues that
dialogue is a relation arising between participants, controlled by no one:

*Corresponding author. Email: a.game@unsw.edu.au

ISSN 0729-4360 print/ISSN 1469-8366 online

© 2009 HERDSA
DOI: 10.1080/07294360802444354
http://www.informaworld.com
46 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

Speaking to others (or to myself), I do not speak of my thoughts; I speak them … Not
[as] a mind to a mind, but [as] a being who has body and language to a being who has
body and language, each drawing the other by means of invisible threads like those who
hold the marionettes – making the other speak, think and become what he is but never
would have been by himself. Thus things are said and thought by a Speech and a Thought
which we do not have but which has us. (p. 19)

In this article we will show that the pedagogic potential of team teaching only
becomes apparent when its dialogic possibilities are recognised. While the term refers
to a diverse range of practices (see Goetz, 2000; Smith, 1994), team teaching is often
thought to involve no more than the summative logic of sharing loads and adding
perspectives. This is to maintain the exchange model of dialogue. In fact, team teach-
ing can more radically transform the learning-teaching relation. By creating a holding
space and holding time that transform the classroom, it can produce a dialogic
community among all participants in the classroom. When there are no longer individ-
ual sources of energy and knowledge, the dialogue involves everyone as learner and
everyone as teacher.
The article draws on our own practice of team teaching. Although we have
designed and coordinated our courses together since 1990, in the late 1990s we began
experimenting with joint rather than sequential lectures, developing techniques that
allowed us to introduce an increasing variety of dialogic components to the lecture. In
2000, when our faculty cut costs by shifting from one- to two-hour lectures and from
two- to one-hour tutorials, we took the opportunity to creatively reconsider the role of
lectures and tutorials. Lectures became fully interactive large classes, leaving tutorials
free to focus on collegial academic skills development. While it is difficult for a solo
lecturer to depart from a monologue, a teaching team can focus large classes (up to
300 students in our case) around dialogic activities that have been traditionally asso-
ciated with tutorials or seminars (Game & Metcalfe, 2007). By having more than one
teacher present in front of the class, the position of the knowing teacher is diffused. If
students can see teachers engaged in dialogue, working out difficult questions
between them, they come to trust teachers, seeing them not as people with a complete
knowledge, but as people devoted to learning and thinking. Team teaching opens
opportunities for students to join the team as teachers and learners. Although students
and teachers have different responsibilities, we are all learning through our collective
dialogue.

Dialogue
Classroom relations constantly shift between different social logics. One form is based
on exchanges between self-conscious individuals motivated by subjective purpose.
The other is based on the relaxation of identity and subjectivity that comes with a
dialogic relation. While these different states imply each other, each arising in relation
to the other, they involve fundamentally different senses of being, space and time, of
who, where and when we are.
Bohm (1985) made this point in a description of a weekend dialogue in which he
participated:

In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to
defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group
was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal
 Higher Education Research & Development 47

quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relation-
ship between participants. A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is
based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the
process of dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said
to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is
capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-
established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal
itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no
speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. (p. 175)

Dialogue arose on this weekend when there was a shift from the negativity of identity
logic to the openness of dialogue. At first, people were defending positions and iden-
tities. But there was a change, Bohm says, when people realised that what they were
doing together was more important than the protection of the self.
The significance of this dialogic shift for educational theory is that participants
change their cognitive capacities when no longer self-conscious individuals. People
who identify with knowledge take it personally, seeing the world and others only for
what these say about themselves, as a mirror of themselves. People in dialogue,
however, are able to hear the differences offered by others, because they are not
personally affronted. They can imagine the experience of others and therefore under-
stand how different perspectives can co-exist. Through the play of differences, they
are making something that they share with others but which is no one’s personal
property. Same and different are no longer qualities attributed to discrete individuals:
each participant makes a unique contribution but no one can say who contributes what.
Everyone is connected to this ‘common pool of meaning’, but connected in their
unique ways; everyone learns from the different possibilities in the common pool, but
everyone learns in a way that makes particular sense to them.
Education is this drawing out of potential. The meeting of what is common and
what is different is the primal encounter referred to by such pedagogic terms as inter-
est, inspiration, engagement, wonder, fascination, curiosity and relevance. Through
meeting the differences of others, we meet the difference in ourselves. We change by
becoming who we are: what we know of the world reveals unexpected potential when
recontextualised through dialogue. It follows that dialogue is always a learning
experience and that there is no learning without this dialogic meeting with difference.
Moreover, if there is no learning, no sense that one experience significantly differs
from another, there is no sense of aliveness.
Deep learning only occurs through this engagement. Using their own bodies and
lives as learning tools, participants in dialogue live ideas. In holding an idea, playing
with it, they feel its inner form from within their own. It is therefore not simply meta-
phorical to say that dialogue transforms us, opens new worlds and expands minds. It
is our difference as beings that allows us to see the world differently: no longer
confined to subjectivity, we discover unexpected potential through being in embodied
relation with the world. These ontological shifts are everyday aspects of classroom
life. To learn more about the world, we must learn how to live in it differently and we
do this through dialogue (see Brookfield & Preskill, 1999; Metcalfe & Game, 2006.)

The teacher’s responsibility

If the teacher does not control the classroom dialogue, what do they do? The teacher’s
primary responsibility is to facilitate informed dialogue among and between teachers
48 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

and students, retaining an awareness of the learning process itself. This requires the
creation of a safe learning space where participants are neither self-conscious nor self-
protective and where, therefore, they can make the ontological shift required if they
are to get into dialogue.
These pre-conditions for dialogue can be understood in terms of Winnicott’s
(1991) concept of potential space or holding space, terms that describe the state
where the once-isolated individual feels carried by the enlivened environment. In this
space, people experience a wholeness that cannot be described in terms of a dichot-
omy between inside and outside; it is a space that involves a sense of organic rather
than chronological time, where the future is experienced as the unfolding of present
potential (see Metcalfe & Game, 2002). Based on the relational logic of both/and
rather than the individualist logic of either/or, potential space is the environment that
allows mother and baby, therapist and patient, teacher and student to carry each
other. In all of these learning situations, the holding or potential space allows possi-
bilities to be held open; there is a sense of safety in this openness that does not rely
on self-assertion.
Winnicott argues that all deep learning experiences are modelled on the example
of the young child playing in the presence of an un-intrusive mother. When students
are in the presence of someone who guards them without interference, they learn to
trust their authentic responses to new situations. The implication of Winnicott’s argu-
ment is that teachers need the patience and courage to avoid pre-empting the
student’s learning process, to avoid giving the student answers for which they are not
prepared. Teachers need to stay present to the emerging dialogue, rather than being
distracted by their preconceptions and their own subjective fears and desires. While
Winnicott (1990) insists that no one entirely escapes these subjective states, he
argues that maturity is the ability to be aware of them and therefore learn from them
when they arise (pp. 30–34). This awareness turns what might have been a distrac-
tion into a return to the here and now of the classroom.
The aware teacher works, like the engaged student, on the crest of knowledge.
They come across as genuine and passionate because they are good learners. Since the
teachers live and breathe their knowledge, there is no final way to say what is known,
for knowledge is continually being reformulated as life offers new connections. The
deep form of knowing that teachers need is characterised by a simultaneous unknow-
ing. To allow new connections to emerge from classroom dialogue, teachers must hold
lightly those that they have previously made, allowing their knowledge to re-form
around new starting points that arise in the class. This class is not the same as any
other class.
Whereas feedback is commonly understood as an external form of evaluation,
every response and every recognition in a dialogue is feedback. Feedback is a moment
in the life of a system that doesn’t demarcate boundaries between inside and outside
(Bateson, 1972). The dialogue works because both teachers and students are simulta-
neously receiving and giving feedback, are simultaneously learning and teaching from
each other (see Noddings, 1984, p. 177). It is the openness to receive that accounts for
the effortlessness and lively energy of the engaged classroom. The aware teacher
provides constant feedback through their openness to receive it.
As with feedback, the authority of the aware teacher is not an external imposition
on students but arises from their responsive attention to the class (see Arendt, 1961;
Gordon, 1999; O’Byrne, 2005). Teachers can be trusted as a leader because they serve
the needs of the class rather than allowing their subjective concerns and preconceptions
 Higher Education Research & Development 49

to intrude. Embedded in the rituals and practices of the classroom, authority allows
students and teachers to be open, rather than being self-conscious or self-protective.
The trust involved in organic authority allows teachers to be respectfully honest with
students, helping them to develop a capacity for authentic work. This highlights the
fact that the teacher’s facilitation of dialogue is not a non-confronting laissez-faire
process of letting students do what they want, but is instead a process of challenging
students to go beyond their preconceived ideas, expectations and desires.
This discussion of the teacher’s responsibility highlights the fact that aware teach-
ers are characterised by the maturity to maintain open relationships, avoiding the
premature closures that accompany the defensive desire for self-certainty. In short,
teachers must have learned to tolerate unknowing and the uncertainties of life. This
applies equally in their relations with students, their relations with their disciplinary
specialties and their relations with themselves. In all of these, they need to maintain a
faith in a process without finding false consolation in expectations (see Gaita, 2001;
Murdoch, 1970).
Good teaching, then, is never just a matter of technique and strategy. It necessarily
involves ethical questions about goodness. As Murdoch (1970) says:

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the
attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world … [V]irtue is the attempt
to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. (p. 93)

As teachers, we can never finally master the responsibilities of the good teacher.
The good teacher knows that they are forever learning how to teach and that they need
continuous support from others if they are to meet the world as it really is.

Team teaching and the teacher’s responsibilities

This discussion of the teacher’s responsibilities allows us to appreciate the virtue of
dialogic team teaching. The presence of other teachers as witnesses allows the teacher
to get out of themself and see the world through the eyes of others (see Winnicott,
1991, p. 61). Team teaching that is dialogic is based on an open flow of feedback that
encourages teachers to be aware of how they are responding to the class. Teachers
teach each other.
Many solo lecturers fear the prospect of team teaching because they imagine the
other as judge of their vulnerabilities. This presumption fails to recognise the ontolog-
ical transformation of dialogue: in dialogic team teaching, no teacher is in the position
to judge another for they are carrying the other in themselves. In the same way, it is
the teachers’ carrying of students within themselves that guards against any tendency
to unify as teachers against students. The witnessing in a dialogic classroom takes the
form of support rather than judgement and surveillance.
The need for support is particularly clear in large classes. As Bligh (1975) astutely
remarks, it is not easy to move a tutorial style dialogue into a large lecture (p. 163).
The problem arises because of the multiple responsibilities of the teacher. If the class
is to be dialogic, teachers must give their full attention to the responses of particular
students while remaining aware of the dynamics of the whole class. At the same time
they must be aware of the place of this particular discussion in terms of the needs of
the whole class. They must balance the tension between the overall plans of the class
and the course and the suspension of purpose required for the dialogue to unfold. They
have to continually adjust plans to meet the reality of this class and this day.
50 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

Solo lecturers tend to give monologic lectures because they have difficulty
combining these responsibilities. The full potential of the classroom can present them
with more possibilities than they feel they can handle; they fear that the different
responses of students will throw them off course. By simplifying social relationships
so that the teacher only has one task to do, the monologic lecture channels relational
potential into narrow and pre-established parameters. When teachers give classes
together, on the other hand, the mutual support they provide allows them to safely
hold open the classroom relations. The potential of the class and the difference within
the class are now resources rather than threats. The supportive relation allows lecture
time and space to be used more flexibly and creatively. An attuned teaching team can
readily and fluently carry within its relation the various responsibilities of the teacher.
The dialogue between teachers allows them to think together and think differently at
the same time.

Team teaching a first-year course

To ground the rest of this discussion, we will now consider our own experience of
teaching a large first-year sociology course. Our course, ’Relationships: Sociology
and Everyday Life’, attracts up to 400 students and is organised around short classic
readings by famous sociologists and social philosophers. The course teaches
students to apply this theory in analyses of social relations, from the intrapersonal to
the interpersonal to the international.
The course is organised around large team taught dialogic classes (between 100
and 300 students in each one), which are a cross between traditional lectures, tutorials
and seminars. Because these classes harness the dialogic potential of a large commu-
nity, they develop a powerful energy that carries both teachers and students beyond
their preconceptions. The value of students being able to listen to each other’s discus-
sions of important issues should not be underestimated. A key function of large
classes, not easily replaced technologically, is the opportunity for simple presence, for
the community that emerges from congregation. This provides an enthusiastic and
open-hearted energy that counteracts many of the debilitating effects of the individu-
alising dynamics common in universities. Students learn to appreciate and respect
their own possibilities when they are surprised by hearing their shy and private
inklings enunciated by others.
The keys to the creative responsiveness of these classes are preparation and
structure.

Preparation: workbooks
To prepare students for the role they are to play as part of the team in large classes,
we require them to keep a workbook. Workbooks are the course’s lynchpin. Each
week, before classes, students write about the readings and do an exercise that applies
the readings to an everyday experience. We expect at least an hour’s writing per week
and most students fill a large notebook during the session. The exploratory nature of
workbook writing teaches healthy reading practices: instead of feeling scared and
jealous of difficult texts, students learn how to work with them, in a dialogic way.
The workbook is a supportive disciplined working space that teaches students how
to stay with and draw out their thoughts and hunches. The student’s relation with their
workbooks parallels the dialogic relations between teachers, between students, and
 Higher Education Research & Development 51

between teachers and students. The workbook allows students to focus unselfcon-
sciously on a particular line of thought, bracketing off the perfectionist self-criticism
that inhibits the learning process. Because this free flow is captured in writing,
students have the chance to reflect on it later and develop it further, and more rigor-
ously, by asking themselves the same sorts of questions that their teachers would ask.
The workbook produces a dialogic relation between students and their work, allowing
them to teach themselves, to draw themselves out. By learning to trust in this process,
students develop patience, that is, a relationship to their own anxieties, fears and
frustrations, and a faith in the support provided by a steady work routine.
Like students, teachers must prepare themselves for class, by working through the
readings in their workbooks. We re-read all readings each year, allowing our changing
research interests and our new students to highlight different elements. We cannot
teach unless the readings have come alive again to us. Like students, we prepare by
recording our reading process and course reflections in workbooks. We also use our
workbooks to record our reflections on, and plans for, the course.
Even though we have been teaching this course for many years, the re-reading
process allows us to re-imagine the classes week by week, adapting the curriculum
specified in our course handbook to the interests and needs of the year’s particular
group of students. Drawing on our archive of workbooks, we select appropriate exer-
cises and activities and augment them with new ones. To maintain student interest, we
try to vary the types of activities week by week, choosing a sequence of activities that
helps students develop their analytical skills and face the conceptual issues that are
troubling them. Our first meeting of the week begins with new pages in our workbooks
and ends, through a dialogue that neither of us controls, with lists of planned activities.
Each of us takes from this first meeting some special preparation to do for the
class, such as an exegetical activity or the development of a resource for a class exer-
cise. Then, on the day of each class, even if it is a ‘repeat’ class, we meet again to talk
through our plan, activity by activity, imagining it from the students’ perspective,
ensuring that our activities are fine-tuned and that we have a feel for the whole class.
At a subsequent meeting, we include tutors in these processes of reflection and imag-
ination, discussing the success of previous classes and sharing ideas for the coming
ones. The teamwork in these meetings is essential to the success of our classes: our
different perspectives and experiences ensure that we do not become inattentive to the
needs of the course.

Structure and freedom in large classes

Large classes are a dialogic opportunity for teachers and students to clarify readings,
to draw out the implications of key concepts, to explore the empirical scope of issues
and to test out the usefulness of ideas. In the course of our preparation, the class has
been broken into structured components, none taking longer than 20 minutes. These
usually include one or both of us giving short prepared discussions on a key aspect of
reading, but there are also collective discussions of passages from the readings and
collective analyses of cultural phenomena that relate to the topic and theme of the
week, as well as small group discussions, short writing exercises and collective brain-
storming sessions. The diversity of modes in the class recognises the different ways
in which students learn.
Structuring the class in 20-minute components provides a supportive temporal
quality to the learning process, allowing for patience and respectful relations. This
52 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

structure helps teachers avoid a tendency to rush to an end, giving teachers and
students time to relax, time to attune to each others’ wave lengths and get a feel for
the issues under discussion. The students’ comments are the feedback we need in
order to adjust what we’d planned to say and do. We go into each activity without
needing a certain outcome, because we know there are regular opportunities to take
stock and refocus. Whatever point the discussion has reached will offer possibilities
for the next activity.
By itself, this modular structure might not produce a patient holding environment.
Anxious lecturers might have difficulty holding their nerve, self-conscious lecturers
might have difficulty withholding their preconceptions. With team teaching, teachers
can support each other in attentive and unselfconscious states. Their relation provides
the organic structure that allows them to be fluent and responsive to the unfolding
dialogue. The presence of a supportive witness heightens their awareness of any
tendency to ask leading questions or give premature answers.
With the organic structure of the team teaching relation, teachers can perform
multiple activities simultaneously, remaining aware of how each moment relates to
the whole class and whole course. One teacher can fully engage in a particular line of
discussion because they know the other is listening to the place of that discussion in
the broader setting of the class. The witness allows the talker to fully attend to the
student, who in turn finds their thoughts drawn out because they are being heard with
respect and without reserve. A peer observer from the Learning and Teaching Centre
of our university made the following observation of a large class:

Because Ann and Andrew were both actively involved throughout class, one of them
could focus intently upon a student’s comment, and respond in a way which deepened
the student’s analysis of a concept or idea, while the other scanned the room, looking out
for other speakers and gauging the feel of the group to decide where to take the discus-
sion next. This enabled them to be totally attentive and engaged with the student who
was speaking, whilst simultaneously encouraging widespread participation – around one
third of students contributed during the two-hour period. This dialogic approach to team
teaching created for students the opportunity to engage in an extended, intense, high
quality, analytic, creative and scholarly conversation in which the whole group joined.
The students’ response to this approach throughout the class indicated its success in
effectively engaging and stimulating them – I have not been in a lecture theatre before
as either a student or teacher in which there was this level of sustained and active student
participation in discussion. Through their dialogic approach, the teachers supported their
first year students in attaining a level of analysis that was extraordinary and inspiring,
rivalling that which I had previously experienced in postgraduate discussions.

In short, by creating a potential space between themselves, teachers create that space
in the classroom. As a student put it in an anonymous course evaluation, ‘I love the
team teaching, seeing the teachers’ own thoughts and relation together. This impli-
cates me further as I feel more part of it. There are new voices, a growth of ideas and
knowledge.’ By referring to seeing the teachers’ own thoughts and relation together,
this student is drawing attention to the openness of the state that the teachers are expe-
riencing between themselves. In the Winnicottian classroom, the students are this
‘between’, the reserve of potential upon which creative thinking relies. This is why
students feel implicated in the team teaching and drawn out by the dialogue that they
make possible.
Teachers working dialogically rely on students to draw them out, to help teaching
find what is called for at this moment in the class. By watching teachers think out loud,
 Higher Education Research & Development 53

students lose their fear of speaking unfinished thoughts. They learn how to suspend
their desire to get everything right and instead learn a love of the learning process. The
dialogic lecture theatre models the state of being that is necessary to open thinking,
maturity and a life of learning. It is a model that students learn through their part in it.
The peer observer commented:

When Ann or Andrew responded to a student, they were actively engaging with the
student’s ideas, not merely continuing their own course of thinking. An understanding of
the concepts unfolded in the room as the insights of students built upon each other.
Students were making meaning and not simply coming up with the ‘right’ or expected
response. This was facilitated by the teachers’ careful listening and encouragement of
students to develop their own interpretations of the concepts being discussed. For
instance, they responded to one comment by saying ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that
isn’t it … ?’ and to another student ‘Do you want to say any more?’ and then again after
the student elaborated, ‘More …?’, pushing the student further along in analysis. This
conveyed the message that they were genuinely interested in students’ contributions.
While the approach seemed casual, the nature of their questions indicated careful and
precise thinking and preparation.

Large class activities

To make this discussion more concrete, and evocative, we will describe a segment of
a recent class. Offered in the third week of the course, this class focuses on the social
theorist Emile Durkheim and on the Conclusion to his book The Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life. Team teaching allows us to draw on the different relation we each
have with Durkheim. One of us is by background an anthropologist, trained through
Durkheim’s analysis of religion, while the other is a political theorist who first came
across Durkheim, through his methodological writings, as a sociology lecturer. We
highlight and use these differences by each focusing on different passages of the
week’s reading.

● Andrew begins with a very short introduction, locating Durkheim in the socio-
logical tradition and giving a context for the Conclusion by drawing attention to
the key ideas of congregation and communion, effervescence, ritual, awe, the
sacred and profane.
● In their workbooks, students have been asked to choose and draw out the partic-
ular passage from Durkheim’s reading that most interested them. They were
also asked to connect this passage with an account of an everyday experience in
their lives. So, teaching students how to go about their workbook preparation,
we begin this task ourselves in the large class, putting on screens the passages
that each of us chose.
● We ask students to underline interesting or puzzling words and phrases in our
chosen passages and, from their suggestions, we compile a list that we put on
the board. This list, which comes from all of us and none of us, becomes the
basis of a collective discussion of the passages. Instead of jumping to a compre-
hension of the two passages, or the complete chapter, or Durkheim’s thought
overall, we patiently work from the questions that present themselves. Taking a
point of interest from the list, we ask students to draw out its implications, first
by playing with its possibilities and then by identifying the questions it raises.
When a student identifies something puzzling, we ask the class to address the
question, by identifying possible meanings and then by identifying what issues
54 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

are at stake. As these are open questions that do not presume correct answers,
and do not ask for complete answers, all students are able to contribute.

The openness of this questioning process is aided by team teaching. Each of us is

aware that space must be left for the other teacher, who will have different responses.
This moment of pause is a respectful reminder of the potential of the whole class.
When teachers are aware that the class is not their responsibility alone, they are less
likely to give the anxious student the ready-made answers they seek. To do so would
be to pre-empt the dialogic process that can lead both teachers and students to ideas
that they haven’t yet had.
To further encourage dialogue, we, the teachers, do our own puzzling out loud,
showing the process we use when making sense of what we do not understand. We
ask each other and the students for help when we lose our train of thought or cannot
see the connections between ideas. If one of us hears the other slipping into an old
script, into esoteric jargon, into a leading question, the former, aware of what the
students are experiencing, will pull the latter back into dialogue by asking them to
explain, to elaborate, to give an example, to say what assumptions they are not making
explicit. The teacher who had lost contact with the here and now is brought back to
the class’s need for living thought.
The timing of discussions like this can be difficult for solo teachers, who cannot
watch the clock if they are to stay immersed in the moment of unfolding dialogue. But
the presence of a teaching team gives one of the teachers the opportunity to periodi-
cally balance the value of the present activity with the needs of the whole class.

● After the collective discussion of the lists, Ann talks briefly about her chosen
passage, starting with the words and phrases that she underlined and showing
how she came to understand the potential of these words when she saw them in
connection with a particular everyday experience. She highlights the differences
in her readings of the passage over the years and her differences to Andrew’s
experiences. After she finishes, Andrew spontaneously asks her to reflect on
whether Durkheim’s own theory of social relations can be used to explore these
different relations to a reading. Having heard Ann talk of her ambivalences
about Durkheim, students are relieved to be invited to talk of their own struggles
with this very difficult text. The class, however, is now in a position to make
something interesting of what had simply been an obstacle to reading and think-
ing. By asking Durkheimian questions of these difficult experiences, they raise
the possibility of creating different reading relations.
● To change the energy of the class, we now show two short videotaped inter-
views with musicians. We hope to surprise students, by showing that
Durkheim’s analyses of religion in Australian Aboriginal societies can resonate
with experiences of musical performance and of the musician’s life practice.
This surprise is designed to open students to other possible relevancies of
Durkheim.
● Students are asked to talk in small groups about these interviews. We want them
to have the opportunity to test out, and help each other draw out, their first
impressions.
● Ann then asks the students to talk about what they noticed in the interviews. As
Ann and the students draw each other out, keeping the discussion as open and
lively as they can, students are not paying attention to Andrew, who is listening
 Higher Education Research & Development 55

intently and writing on the board a list of the key terms that are emerging. Ann
is entirely absorbed in the discussion with students, trying to get as deep as
possible into the quality of the experience, without the desire to lead the discus-
sion to any particular conceptual point. Andrew is thinking in a different way,
about key terms that are used that connect to the broader themes in the class and
the course.
● By this stage, there are two apparently unconnected lists on the boards: one with
key words from Durkheim and one with key words to understanding the musical
experience. The class now has a chance to connect the conceptual and the expe-
riential. We ask the students to scan the lists and identify connections that high-
light the spatiality, temporality and ontology of the experiences that Durkheim
is identifying with the sacred. These ideas of space, time and ways of being have
been introduced in earlier weeks in the course, in quite different contexts.

While one of the teachers is facilitating the discussion based on the lists, and on this
class’s content, the other is asking questions about this class’s relation to the issues
and questions that arose in the previous classes. Which teacher does which task
changes fluently during this exercise. This non-linear process of talking about the
current week by evoking earlier weeks continues throughout the course. As the weeks
proceed there is a developing sense of richness. The different theorists enter the class
as interlocutors: students can approach any particular experience from the different
perspectives of the different theorists. The possibilities of previous classes are still
emerging in later classes as new connections are made; the possibilities of the whole
course are present in any particular class. This is Bohm’s ‘new kind of mind com[ing]
into being’.

● By this stage of the two-hour class, teachers and students need a five minute
break to gather their thoughts and refresh themselves.

Small classes
Because team taught large classes perform many of the functions of traditional tutori-
als, they have allowed us to transform our small classes. The focus of these is now on
what students can learn through learning how to teach. We encourage students to work
dialogically, developing their academic skills by developing the patience, openness
and maturity that they have experienced from their teachers.
In weeks 4 to 7, groups of students are responsible for facilitating a segment of the
class. Their role is not to present what they know but to draw out the other students.
These facilitations require students to develop skills in the teamwork of team teaching
and also give them practice in opening issues for analysis. By encouraging students to
imagine themselves as teachers who must be able to imagine themselves as students,
these facilitations teach students how to sustain an open dialogue and keep the life
in ideas. During the facilitation, the teacher takes up the position of Winnicott’s un-
intrusive guardian, learning to listen by not speaking and creating a supportive space
simply through their presence. The teacher contributes more actively during the feed-
back session in the second half of the class, in which students develop reflective skills,
particularly in connection with the process itself.
In week 9, students bring a first draft of their final essay to the class and, through
swapping drafts and talking to each other about them, learn to see their own writing
56 A. Game and A. Metcalfe

through the eyes of others. This insight informs the new piece of drafting they bring
the following week, where the process is repeated. This continues until week 13. The
teacher again plays the role of un-intrusive guardian, not dominating classes but
giving them structure by reading all the drafts, answering questions, and giving
general feedback on the writing process. By the time students submit essays, they have
learned first-hand the patience, as well as the listening and reading skills, necessary
for both collaboration and good writing.
This is much more intensive student-centred work than conventional tutorials
allow. The team taught large classes make it possible.

Conclusion
Team teaching is often thought to involve no more than the addition of an extra
resource or perspective. This view is limited because it maintains the exchange model
of dialogue. A truly dialogic team teaching more radically transforms the learning
experience. The relation between teachers allows them to support each other, to relax
their fears, desires and defences, to be open to the possibilities emerging in the class-
room. This in turn allows them to better fulfil their primary responsibility as teachers:
to hold the learning relations in the classroom so that all participants feel safe in
remaining open in the presence of doubts and questions.
The dialogic community that emerges from team teaching allows both teachers
and students to be present to the learning process itself. It changes the space and the
time of the classroom so that teachers and students are both teaching and learning.
Everyone involved in the class is working at their creative edge, not simply repeating
what they already know but finding words for the knowledge that is emerging for
them. Moreover, the class allows students to learn first-hand the holding capacities
and open states of being that are the basis of maturity and an ongoing life of learning.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr Tracy Barber for her peer review of our class and the anonymous
reviewers for this journal.

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