Professor Gordon Wells

Since July 2000, I have been a member of the Department of Education at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Before that, I was at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, where I was in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, with cross-appointments to the Centre for Teacher Development and the Centre for Applied Cognitive Science.

Prior to moving to Canada in 1984, I was Director of the longitudinal study of language development, "Language at Home and at School", at the University of Bristol, England. In that study, we followed a representative sample of children from age 1 to age 10, recording naturally-occurring samples of interaction at home and at school. This study convinced me that, in addition to an innate predisposition to learn language, children need a rich and varied experience of conversation with others in order to learn how meaning is made and experience construed in the language of their own particular community. In principle, I believe the same holds for learning in school, although guidance and instruction that is both more systematic and more explicit is needed to help children master the registers and genres of written language in which meaning is made in the academic disciplines. The findings and conclusions from this study were published in Language Development in the Pre-School Years (Cambridge U.P., 1985) and The Meaning Makers (Heinemann, 1986).

While in Toronto, I undertook a series of collaborative action research projects with teachers and university colleagues, in which our general aim was to increase understanding of the roles that different modes of discourse can potentially play in learning and teaching in different areas of the curriculum. This we did by creating and progressively improving a variety of inquiry-based activity settings in which we observed, recorded and analyzed the opportunities for learning that were made available through collaborative action, knowledge building, and reflection. Since 1991, the work of the "Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project" (DICEP) has received a series of grants from the Spencer Foundation and has produced a wide range of publications, including Action, Talk, and Text: Learning and Teaching through Inquiry (Teachers College Press, 2001). With their help, I also started Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research (http://education.ucsc.edu/faculty/gwells/networks/).

Over the course of my career, I have developed a strong interest in cultural historical activity theory, as this is being developed on the basis of the seminal ideas of Vygotsky and Bakhtin.I am also greatly indebted to Halliday’s work on systemic functional linguistics and to the educational writings of Dewey. The influence of all these writers, together with what I have learned from teacher colleagues, permeates all my recent work and is clearly seen in Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education (Cambridge U.P., 1999). With Guy Claxton, I recently edited Learning for Life in the 21^st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education (Blackwell, 2002). All these books have been translated into Spanish.

During my career, I have taught in seconday schools in England, France and Ghana and have been a consultant and invited speaker in many countries, raanging from Mexico to Singapore and from Russia to Australia. Most recently, I have made several visits to Spain and Brazil, where I have been involved in the professional development of teachers on the need for dialogic inquiry in the classroom.

In the rest of my life, I enjoy spending holidays in Europe and visiting my family - particularly my grandchildren - in England. I like classical music, particularly chamber music and opera, and play the flute (when I have time). Since coming to Santa Cruz, I have also rediscovered the pleasures of gardening and home renovation. For my bedtime reading, I enjoy historical novels.