Dialogue Strategies on Distance Education

Abstract

This paper presents strategies of written communication, from a dialogic conception of education, which focuses on co-participation between students and tutors in the learning development. It starts from the assumption that the tutor is an educator, and is responsible by students education, it will mediate learning, establishing a warm and instigator dialogue that deal through knowledge problematization. The concept of dialogic learning, developed in a research whose study object was a tutoring service, provides fundamentals to establish the characteristics of interaction, to select the apropriated language for distance dialogue, to get student engagement and autonomy. Sociocultural studies by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Wells, among others, are introduced in order to investigate the dialogic interaction as an alternative to the distance dialogue. It is suggested the use of sensitive writing, to establish students empathy, and dialogic inquiry, to problematize questions. These strategies are analyzed in light of a practical experience, in which a tutor has established a questions and answers game, and with that, in some cases, got engagement of students, through the establishment of empathy, the sharing ideas construction process and the prevalence of the dialogic discourse function. Eventually, it is proposed a reflection on the importance of student autonomy in distance education and how to encourage that autonomy.