Dr Fiona Maine is a lecturer in literacy education at the University of Cambridge, specialising in children's critical and creative thinking as they engage with a range of text modes (written, visual and moving-image). Her book Dialogic Readers: Children talking and thinking about visual textscelebrates the sophisticated and dynamic discussions that elementary-aged children can have as they make meaning together, and adds further weight to the argument that talk as a tool for learning should form a central part of classroom pedagogy. Her current work investigates the affordance of moving image media as a text source for reading comprehension instruction. Again centralising the value of talk and dialogic interaction, this time she moves her attention to teachers and how they can model key language to support high-level thinking.
