itional approach to teaching has serious problems and limitations. Shor believes that the opportunities for learning can be greatly enhanced if teachers encourage horizontal communications in their classroom. Shor expands on this idea by suggesting that not only should peer to peer horizontal communication be encouraged, but students should be made comfortable enough to engage in horizontal communications with their teacher. He adds that this type of discourse might be frightening to some educators because, among other things, it implies that students have the right to question the information shared by their teachers. They even have the right to disagree openly with their teacher's reasoning and their conclusions (Shor 86).
Although classroom discourse is the principal medium of learning in school, teachers rarely pay attention to how they structure it. Mark Aulls notes in Journal of Educational Psychology that studies suggest that patterns of discourse in the classroom are opaque to the participants. Therefore, teachers were not likely to be able to state the forms, patterns, and system of discourse that they jointly constructed with students during curriculum events. Therefore, teachers tend to focus mainly on what they are teaching and what their students are learning. At best, awareness of the nature of classroom discourse is a secondary consideration for many teachers (Aulls 56). Shor suggests this is the natural consequence of the fact that in traditional classroom education the exchange of ideas is either (a) actively discouraged, or (b) is tolerated but not encouraged, or (c) is encouraged but only for limited periods of time and in specific under limited and controlled conditions and only with the permission of the instructor (Shor 98).
The most common type of discourse in a traditional classroom involves teachers lecturing on a particular topic. In this environment, the most common type of interactive discourse...