In modern educational theory, teacher pedagogical artistry tends to be a neglected notion and its merit as an inherent quality of good teaching (Eisner, 2004) is paradoxically oblivious. As Bellezza (2020) characteristically remarks, ‘teacher artistry is grossly undervalued and greatly malnourished’ (p. 27). This occurs within an era, where the teaching profession is primarily taught as ‘a technological, knowledge-based practice (Hadjipanteli, 2021, p. 15), which means that the understanding of teaching as a poetic and art-full practice whose aesthetic energies have a critical effect on the learning ecology (e.g., Rubin, 1985; Eisner, 2004; Lutzker, 2021), seems languid.

When considering teaching as an art, what seems to be the most important in our opinion, is that a teacher works as an artist (Dewey, 1910), and pedagogy is intertwined with artistry. Therefore, a teacher-artist predominantly cares for the design and implementation of teaching ‘within a purposeful, informed, ethical and aesthetic framework’ (Ewing and Smith, 2001, p. 16). In this light, pedagogical artistry in teaching could go far beyond a teacher’s knowledgeable presence, focusing also on the ‘shape and feel of the relationships’ (Thompson, 2015, p. 439) that students compose throughout their learning. This suggests that pedagogical artistry could bring the aesthetic custody and affective manipulation of teaching together, boosting the formation of an engaging and ethically well-structured learning ecology. For this purpose, teachers will need to energise a synthesis of poetical, intellectual and ethical dispositions to unify their pedagogical competence with artistic sensitivity.

In this article, we concentrate on a distinct outlook of a teacher’s pedagogy, namely their competence to enact and encourage dialogic interactions with their students. In particular, we are interested in the different qualities of dialogue that a teacher both could use and promote in class, as a catalyst for students’ active participation in the construction of meaning and learning. We draw on the growing body of research on dialogic pedagogy, which shows how teachers can become facilitators in students’ co-construction of knowledge and critical engagement with multiple ideas; we argue that this is an important aspect of a teacher’s artistry and we specify it as dialogic teacher artistry. Specifically, we examine the following research questions:

We view this topic as particularly important and timely, given the growing diversity within student populations across western societies. The increased heterogeneity in classrooms, due to the students’ wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, calls for more inclusive and student-centred approaches to pedagogy that would take advantage of the students’ rich backgrounds. Additionally, as explained in Section 3, we view dialogue as an instrumental tool that can be used for the teaching of all cognitive areas. This broad applicability justifies the need for teachers to develop what we call dialogic teacher artistry for the successful implementation of dialogic pedagogies.

Identifying the influential ‘ability’ of a ‘true teacher’ that is essential to their motivational pedagogy, Dewey (1910) indicates pedagogical artistry. This ability originates from the Aristotelian concept poetry, which means ποιεῖν (making) and, therefore, accompanies the practice of technê (Aristotle, 1999). For Aristotle, technê is an intellectual virtue that helps us know ‘how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made’ (1999, 1140a12–1140a14). Following this conceptualisation, Sennett (2009) elaborates on technê with the notion of craftship—‘the skill of making things well’ (p. 8)—which necessitates, as he expounds, all the mental and ethical power of one’s self. However, if we ponder technê as equivalent to the meaning of art, in modern thinking, this tends to provoke misinterpretations, since technê is rather only associated with technology and technical skills. This interconnection signifies a separation of the rational from the expressiveness and aesthetics, aspects that in contemporary perception are meant to be at the heart of art (Ingold, 2000), which is typically seen as a creative activity.

Drawing upon the broader and more original sense of art as technê, we adopt both Eisner’s (2002) thesis that artistry ‘pertains to the crafting of action’ (p. 382, italics original), and Schön’s (1987) conception that it stands for one’s professional practice knowledge. Therefore, recognising teaching as a poetic and art-ful practice, this incites a critical consideration of a teacher’s artistry (e.g., Eisner, 2002; Bellezza, 2020; Lutzker, 2021). As Hadjipanteli (2020) highlights, in teaching ‘every pedagogical choice and action’ is intertwined with ‘a wide range of aesthetic acts: instructive, organisational, communicative and administrative’ (p. 204), within which a teacher can infuse their pedagogical artistry. This circumstance ascribes to pedagogical artistry a complexity and multimodality (Eisner, 2002; Andrews, 2017), making it look like a kaleidoscopic phenomenon that can inspire the learning ecology within a class. Eisner (2002) enhances this view, by emphasising that ‘[g]ood teaching depends on artistry and aesthetic considerations’, and that a teacher needs to know how to appropriately respond to ‘all aspects of teaching that follow no rule’, but ‘they need to be felt’ (p. 382). Here, Eisner reminds us that teaching is largely a social practice dependent on real-life aesthetics; a given condition that requires teachers’ vigilance and pedagogical prudence in order that they sense, for example, the unsaid messages from students’ learning and behavioural responses within an activity, or yet, to discern what emotional-ethical conditions influence their learning process at a specific moment.

In this line of thinking, we might acknowledge a few key characteristics of pedagogical artistry. Taking as granted that a teaching/learning ecology varies from class to class, potentially, owing to students’ different profiles, idiosyncrasies and cultures, there is not solely a single approach or a fixed method for teachers to put in praxis their pedagogical artistry (Eisner, 2002; Piazolli, 2018). In addition, their artistry can be embedded in the construction of a lesson in regard to students’ concrete learning interests; the design of a curriculum unit in conjunction with a specific methodology suitable for students’ educational needs; the selection and creation of teaching materials that address students’ learning needs; the teacher’s talk and motion; and moreover, the exploitation of classroom space. By these indicative paradigms, it becomes obvious that pedagogical artistry can function both as process and product (Sinclair and Kelman, 2013). As a process, it can shape the aesthetic elements of the form and content of an activity and as a product, it is perceptible within the live performance itself of teachers’ instructive energies.

Although this multidimensionality of pedagogical artistry insinuates that each teacher could exercise it in various and alternative manners, what really undergoes in every case is that pedagogical artistry is performed with the synergy both of poetical and ethical dispositions (Eisner, 2002; Sennett, 2009; Andersen, 2020; Hadjipanteli, 2020). Rubin (1985) contends that a teacher’s pedagogical artistry entails ‘a personal style’ of teaching energised by flair, originality, ‘genuine commitment and an educated mind’ (p. 165). Likewise, Eisner (2002) argues that this harmonised ethical-intellectual exertion required by a teacher exacts ‘sensibility, imagination, technique, and the ability to make judgements about the feel and significance of the particular’ (382). Creativity, playfulness, empathy and togetherness are some additional pedagogical dispositions of a teacher’s artistry (Hadjipanteli, 2020). Carr’s (2003) depiction of teacher-artist ‘as a good jazz musician […] whose techniques adapt and evolve in constant sensitive response to the needs of the musical moment’, enable us to infer that teaching as art is a practice that comprises a ‘constant creative interplay with the needs and challenges’ (p. 27) of every pedagogical occasion.

In literature, the significance of a teacher’s pedagogical artistry is intimately connected with the optimisation of students’ vigorous learning, exciting their attentiveness, affective response and embodied participation (e.g., Hadjipanteli, 2020; Rawson, 2022). From this perspective, a teacher’s pedagogical artistry is transmuted into a vital source of students’ ‘eager and poetical engagement’ (Hadjipanteli, 2020, p. 204). In Greene’s (1995), view such a result forms the cornerstone for significant learning, because it is driven by the desire of exploration and search. In this conceptual context, a teacher’s pedagogical artistry denotes a critical formative factor of students’ learning ecology; and concurrently, it constitutes a powerful and impactful property of a teacher’s pedagogy that inextricably lies at the core of the notion of good teaching. Furthermore, it is critical to note that a teacher’s pedagogical artistry could be considered, as entailed by the discussion above, a culturally driven ability. This affirms, on the one hand, the likely diversity and heterogeneity of teachers’ pedagogical artistry in different cultures and suggests, on the other hand, that teachers need to be familiar with their students’ culture, so that they can easier discern their learning preferences, predispositions and needs.

Dialogic approaches to teaching and learning have received increased attention in recent decades due to their association with student active participation, and improved understanding and achievement (e.g., Howe et al., 2019). The field is characterised by two main strands of dialogic pedagogies: (a) instrumental dialogic pedagogies, which view dialogue as a tool of teaching that is independent to the subject-matter or the participants, and (b) non-instrumental dialogic pedagogies, which view meaning making as inherently dialogic (Matusov, 2018). In this paper, we adopt the instrumental dialogic pedagogy approach because we conceptualise it as a tool that teachers can use in order to achieve learning goals of the curricula. This tool can be used in the teaching of all cognitive areas, including the teaching of language, citizenship education and the natural sciences. Following this, despite the existence of various approaches, and thus terms, to the study of productive forms of dialogue (i.e., ‘dialogic teaching’ by Alexander, 2017; ‘accountable talk’ by Michaels and O’Connor, 2015; ‘dialogic inquiry’ by Wells, 1999), there seems to be consensus on the characteristics of productive classroom dialogue (Howe and Abedin, 2013; Hennessy et al., 2016). A dialogic lesson is one where students are encouraged to share their ideas, elaborate on them, and justify them. They have opportunities to listen to and engage with other ideas and perspectives, build on them or challenge them. Working in small groups is a fundamental setting in this environment because this provides students with more space to express themselves and work with a certain number of ideas collaboratively. In this environment, students actively develop their learning as they co-construct meaning with their peers.

Conducting a dialogic lesson requires a skillful teacher with dialogic dispositions, who can develop the required settings for productive dialogues to occur and guide students through this dialogic process. First, the teacher needs to build a suitable classroom culture that promotes students’ dialogic ethos (Alexander, 2017). This entails that students should feel safe knowing that they belong in a group where all ideas are respected and that all challenges and criticisms are towards ideas and not the person who is expressing them (Littleton and Mercer, 2013). Similarly, students should be trained for dialogic behaviour when working in groups; they should respect one another, make sure that all group members contribute to the discussion and that all ideas are being considered (Littleton and Mercer, 2013).

Second, teachers should not act as an authoritative figure in the dialogue, which seeks to evaluate students’ knowledge through questioning, as the traditional teacher role would require. Instead, the teacher should know how to re-purpose the goal of classroom dialogue so that they become the ground for students to express their ideas, even their half-based ideas, and co-construct their thinking. In this setting, the teacher should act as a facilitator and guide of students’ interactions (Mortimer and Scott, 2003). In particular, teachers are expected to initiate such interactions by asking open-ended questions (e.g., Nystrand et al., 2003; Wells and Arauz, 2006; Vrikki and Evagorou, 2023), modelling dialogic talk, and identifying differences between students’ opinions so that they could be resolved (Alexander, 2017; Wilkinson et al., 2017). The language that teachers use has a key role in achieving the kind of dialogue that is productive. In particular, teachers should use language of reasoning (e.g., ‘because’, ‘so’, ‘but’, ‘if’, ‘how’, and ‘why’), possibility (e.g., ‘would’, ‘maybe’, ‘could’ and ‘might’) and vague language (e.g., ‘like’, ‘kind of/sort of’ and ‘or something/or anything’) in order to achieve the provisionality and possibility thinking that productive discussions require (Maine and Čermáková, 2022).

For these reasons, we conceptualise the teachers’ skills and dispositions required for developing dialogic pedagogy to be part of a teacher’s artistry; we call it teacher dialogic artistry. Building on these key presuppositions of dialogic pedagogy in combination with the theory of pedagogical artistry, we conceptualise teacher dialogic artistry based on a nexus of essential dispositions and language qualities.

Teacher dialogic artistry, like dialogue per se, is a cognitive, poetical and normative concept. ‘Genuine dialogue is extremely demanding’, as Kazepides (2012) argues; ‘it requires respect, trust, open-mindedness, a willingness to listen and to risk one’s own preconceptions, fixed beliefs, biases and prejudices in the pursuit of truth’ (p. 915). In harmony with this spectrum of prerequisites, dialogic pedagogy is also challenging, as it requests from teachers to build a learning ecology infused by similar intellectual and ethical dispositions conducive to students’ personal and spirited involvement in the dialogic process.

In this paper, we have discussed both from a theoretical and practical perspective, how teachers are expected to configure a dialogic ecology in their class concerted by their dialogic artistry. In this respect, we recommend dialogic pedagogy as a poetic and art-full practice guided by a teacher, who cares for helping students extend their existing ‘dialogical nature of the self’ as a ‘human achievement’ (Kazepides, 2012, p. 914). The three essential qualities of teacher dialogic artistry proposed could significantly affect students’ dialogic performance, encouraging them to construct good relationships with the democratic, synergistic, insightful and investigative processes incurred in dialogue. Therefore, we might assume that a dialogic space built on a teacher’s togetherness, provisionality and exploratory disposition communicated by their behavioural and linguistic actions can inspire students to form an aesthetics of good dialogue and an ethics of dialogic self.

Implications for teacher training and teacher professional development can be drawn. To cultivate dialogic artistry, teachers should develop relevant pedagogical dispositions and possess certain language qualities. Training programmes should aim to raise teachers’ awareness of dispositions of togetherness, provisionality and exploration, and provide appropriate tools for translating these dispositions into practice. A code of verbal communication should accompany these dispositions to help teachers develop an appropriate dialogic ecology for students.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

AH and MV conceived the idea of teacher dialogic artistry, suggested the three dimensions of teacher dialogic artistry, and presented the discussion of the article. AH developed the theory of pedagogical artistry. MV discussed the key presuppositions for dialogic pedagogy. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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