Dialogue Education

Dialogue Education is an approach to adult learning developed by the educator Jane Vella beginning in the 1980s, drawing together ideas from Paulo Freire, Kurt Lewin, Malcolm Knowles and Benjamin Bloom into one set of principles and practices. Vella worked out the approach through her doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in 1981 she founded the Jubilee Popular Education Centre, now called Global Learning Partners, which has since trained more than 3,500 people from 60 countries in designing and running dialogue based learning. The method shifts attention from what a teacher says to what a learner does, treating learners as people who make their own decisions rather than empty vessels waiting to be filled, and it is built from two way dialogue, achievement based objectives written with action verbs, and learning tasks framed as open questions. It works as a form of constructivism, and can support transformative learning by drawing in cognitive, emotional and physical elements of a learning activity together. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/