The Department of Education of the University of Nicosia would like to invite you to the Colloquium Presentation entitled: Dialogue as a Social Learning Practice. The presentation will take place online on Wednesday, 4 February 2026 at 18:00.

In the session Fiona Maine will explore the value of engaging children in dialogue as part of their learning. Moving beyond the notion that ‘talk’ is valuable for learning, the session will explore how ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogic teaching’ can support communities of learners to be tolerant, empathetic and inclusive as they engage with the ideas of each other. Now a professor at Exeter University, Fiona was formally the PI of a large multi-national project called DIALLS, working with researchers across and beyond Europe (including Nicosia!). The project focused on how children’s discussions about social values could be enhanced as they learned how to engage dialogically with each other.

Speaker:

Fiona Maine
Professor of Language and Literacy in Education
University of Exeter, UK

Fiona Maine joined the School of Education at the University of Exeter in 2022 as Professor of Language and Literacy in Education. She co-leads the Centre for Research in Language and Literacies. and she is the Director for Post-Graduate Research in the School of Education. Her specialisms are in primary literacy, particularly concerning the development of children’s language, reading, critical and creative thinking and the role that dialogue can play in learning. Central to her work is children’s dialogic engagement with visual and multimodal texts, and how their interpretations of ambiguous and complex texts can be shared and explored. Fiona has extensive experience supporting teachers to enhance their literacy teaching practices. Prior to her appointment at Exeter, she worked as a lecturer and then associate professor for 10 years at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is a longstanding member of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) and serves on their Research Committee and National Council.