“They go hand in hand”: Dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging in two elementary classrooms

Elementary school children bring a rich diversity of language to classrooms, a richness that often goes undervalued in educational settings in which teachers feel they must and do emphasize dominant ways of using English. The ways in which teachers interact with children about their language use can influence the linguistic belonging of children from nondominant linguistic backgrounds—their sense of being loved, valued, included, and recognized in positive ways for how they use and understand language. This work addresses connections between dialogic pedagogy and the belonging of multilingual children in two California, English-dominant elementary classrooms. The manuscript centers on the following questions: (1) How did teachers view dialogic instruction and plan dialogically? (2) What did dialogic instruction look like when enacted in these two classrooms? (3) How did dialogic instruction–including professional care and love for multilingual children–relate to the linguistic belonging of multilingual children in these two classrooms? The study concludes that these teachers saw dialogic instruction and the belonging of multilingual children as connected and that they worked hard to find space for dialogic instruction within scripted and district-planned curricula. During dialogic instruction, teachers accepted answers that were not conventionally correct, honored and demonstrated care for students and embraced multiple, diverse ways of expressing answers from their students, including affirming multilingual student language use that did not conform to dominant English standards. Dialogic pedagogy contributed to the belonging of multilingual children in these two classrooms

Why do students choose the option of the Open Syllabus in a conventional university?

The purpose of the presented mixed qualitative-quantitative research is to examine college students’ diverse reasons for choosing the Open Syllabus, which allows students in a conventional university to define their goals for education, curriculum, instruction, assessment, ways of learning, and so on—what traditionally constitutes “Self-Directed Education.” Most of those students articulated their interest in self-education, which consists of self-directed and responsive education

Dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions: The use of Mederu to understand Moyatto experiences

This study discusses professional love in the context of online sessions where healthcare professionals employ a dialogic framework to reflect on or explore how discomfort arises in their interprofessional practices. The goal of this study is to provide frontline practitioners and educators with insights into what constitutes professional love in dialogue and to suggest avenues of support for the development of continuous health profession education through such dialogue. We took a reflective writing approach based on observations of dialogic practices. This essay represents a reflective writing conducted by the first author as he explored, in his own practice, love in dialogic interactions among professionals in online sessions. He established a Study Group in 2014, aiming to improve interprofessional collaboration through dialogue on Moyatto, which is defined as emotional, cognitive, and physical distress experienced when individuals face conflicting communication with people who have different viewpoints and interests. We describe actual events that occurred in sessions and interactions that continue even without direct conversations after the conclusion of the session. The results indicate that the first step for professionals to experience love in their professional practice is to share the Moyatto experiences without any quid pro quo in response to the other’s narrative. Even after the session\u27s conclusion, the participants continued to feel something that could not be verbalized because of the other’s alienness. Therefore, the interactions comprising the exchanging of Moyatto experiences can continue even without direct conversations, and such experiences can motivate participants to inquire about perspectives hitherto unknown to them. We postulate that this process can be regarded as Mederu, a Japanese sense of loving used by people to willingly observe and care for the diverse elements of others or materials. This transitional learning that transcends professional and disciplinary boundaries may need to recur at various points in a professional’s career, requiring more sustainable and stable educational resources

An educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between Japanese and Chinese students: A Bakhtinian perspective on dialogue and love

In today’s culturally diverse world, the ability to engage in effective communication with individuals from different backgrounds has become increasingly significant. In particular, overcoming emotional resistance when interacting with individuals from culturally distinct backgrounds is an important educational challenge. In this paper, we discuss the significance of educational practices that facilitate productive intercultural communication, drawing inspiration from the perspectives of the Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin, who valued “dialogues” between “others” who hold conflicting ideas about the same subject. Bakhtin valued the “outsideness” of others, recognizing it as a means to reveal the multifaceted nature of ideologies, which have been unquestionably accepted by individuals within the same cultural milieu. Additionally, he appreciated the positive atmosphere that could develop between speakers, which plays a key role in alleviating the emotional distress associated with reacting to perspectives from alien cultural backgrounds as a significant factor in promoting meaningful dialogues. Based on Bakhtin’s insights, we designed an experimental educational approach to mediate conflicting ideas between Japanese and Chinese university students by alleviating the emotional distress they experienced when faced with conflicting viewpoints. Thus, the research question of the present study is how we can promote participants’ critical investigations on each speaker’s conflictive cultural view and develop their abilities to bridge the gaps in culturally divided worldviews. After an analysis of these theories and empirical data, we comprehensively proposed strategies to enhance the quality of tense intercultural communication while discussing conflicting themes. Promoting positive emotions toward partners, consistent with the concept of “professional love” proposed in this special issue, is regarded as one of the most crucial elements of our educational approach

A happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools

Often, “system crashers” are portrayed as disturbed children (students) who actively break the institutional system work and disturb relationships with other people. However, some system crashers are perfectly happy children who, precisely due to their happiness, liveliness, and rich imagination, do not fit into a conventional school. In this paper, I provide a detailed case of such a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools. I found out that at home, the parents of the system crasher often reflected and rethought their parenting practices, priorities, and values to shelter their child’s happy life, often at a great expense for themselves. In contrast, the conventional school either ignored or punished the happy system crasher to preserve its institutional practices and keep them smooth. I hypothesize that conventional school is aimed at promoting a disciplinary society by making students convenient, obedient, and useful citizens at the expense of the student’s authorial agency. In contrast, parents and democratic schools address a happy system crasher’s disruption of their lives by rethinking and renegotiating their practices. Finally, I argue that happy system crashers are essential for Democratic and Dialogic Education

The merged methods and the dialogic research approach

The history of the merged methods started in 1949, more than seventy years ago (Gobo, Fielding, La Rocca, & van der Vaart, 2022). The introduction of the merged methods as the new group of methods in Social Science heralded a new era of research more than ten years ago. It is timely to ask why these methods should be of interest to the partisans of the dialogic approach and how the merged methods can be strengthened and developed by the existing tools from the arsenal of the dialogic approach

The Stand on Dialogic Pedagogy in Our Times of Peace and War: My Perspective on December 12, 2022

This essay represents the publication of my keynote address at the First DPJ online conference on December 12, 2022. In my speech, I defined how I perceive “our times” and how Dialogic Pedagogy in our times of peace and war may try to address these challenges or even if we should do so. I continued developing the concept of Ontological Dialogic Education. What is the role of Ontological Dialogic Education in addressing the challenges of our times, and is it relevant at all? Why and how can it contribute to a vision of a liberal democracy, if at all? This questioning let me introduce a key post-Enlightenment notion of education based on students’ self-determination and dignity

The (Im)possibility of Education: Theory and Method in Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Gayatri Spivak’s Righting Wrongs

Postcolonial critics Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942–) have both made attempts at offering pedagogical formulas that take into account the student’s experiences in order to oust oppressive tendencies from the classroom, and at first glance, many of their ideas seem close to identical: Freire speaks dismissively of “banking” education (75), and Spivak rejects rote learning (“Righting” 551); Freire argues that a reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction is a prerequisite for proper education (all participants need to be “teachers and students” simultaneously [53]), and Spivak exhorts the educator to “learn to learn from below” (548). In other words, both scholars advocate a pedagogy whose “very legitimacy lies in…dialogue” (Freire 109), and they both undertake what this text labels a methodological leap from theory to practice. The aim of this article, then, is to find out how or to what extent Freire and Spivak render their pedagogical theories practicable and whether they manage to circumvent the danger of transference, of imposing the educator’s agenda on the learner. The article’s response to this question is no, in Freire’s case, and yes, but only provisionally, in Spivak’s. When Freire puts his teacher in charge of deciding what voices in the classroom should be heard and what voices should be gagged, he leaves the door open for renewed oppression and a mere turning of the tables, clearly against the grain of his own line of argument. Spivak, on the other hand, leaves no loopholes for oppressive tendencies in her methodology; however, as she usually shuns “the production of models [of practice] as such,” withdraws her own formulas, and uses deconstruction as a “safeguard against the repression or exclusion of ‘alterities,” her settling for a certain praxis can only be temporary and provisional (“Can the Subaltern” 103, Norton 2110)

Discussion Formats for Addressing Emotions: Implications for Social-Emotional Learning

Scholars of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) advocate discussion as a promising instructional method yet rarely specify how such discussions should be conducted. Facilitating classroom discussions is highly challenging, particularly about emotions. Furthermore, the SEL literature contains contradictory discursive imperatives; it typically overlooks the gaps between students’ and teachers’ emotional codes and how these codes are shaped by culture, class, and gender. The current study explores different ways in which teachers facilitate classroom dialogue about emotions. We analyze data drawn from a two-year ethnographic study conducted as part of a design-based implementation research project aimed at fostering productive dialogue in primary language arts classrooms, looking in particular at two lessons centered around a story about crying. We found two different interactional genres for discussions about emotions: (1) inclusive emotional dialogue, in which students share emotions experienced in their everyday lives; (2) emotional inquiry, in which students explore emotions, their expressions, and their social meanings. Both types of discussion generated informative exchanges about students’ emotions. Yet the discussions also put the teacher and students in challenging positions, often related to the need to navigate between contradictory discursive norms and emotional codes

A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting

In this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence. Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969). In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education