Search

Contemporary school contexts present challenges for novice teachers seeking to support students' literacy development by bringing content into dialogue with students' lives. These challenges, framed as wobble moments, often contribute to high rates of teacher attrition. However, dialogue with peers, colleagues, and mentors can help teachers learn from the tensions they encounter as they enact dialogic literacy instruction. The authors share the struggles of novice teachers working to enact dialogical practices and describe how an oral inquiry process framework helped them negotiate these challenges. Working from a Bakhtinian stance, the authors present three wobble moments that were connected to school structures, personal and professional identities, and conformity to demonstrate how the oral inquiry process helped the participants learn from the difficulties they faced. Findings suggest that the oral inquiry process framework can help teachers navigate difficulty through dialogue and enact pathways that empower them. Recommendations for implementing this framework are also included.

Using the experiences of Andy, a working class adolescent exploring his gay identity, and the dialogical and transactional relationship he developed with Kristi, his senior-year English teacher, we argue that the teaching of reading and writing must be seen as more than the learning of discrete skills to enable future employment. On the contrary, all transactions with texts should be viewed as providing learners with a range of ways to scrutinize their lives and the lives of others. We suggest that by taking a transactional and dialogical stance on the teaching of English, teachers and learners become inquirers into and ongoing co-constructors of their individual and collective selves. Through dialogue with others, they simultaneously dialogue with themselves, becoming agents in the continuing formation of their many cultural lives. Specifically, we use the experiences described herein to show the unique and necessary presence of dialogical transactions in the lives of Andy and Kristi and the range of possibility and consequence these transactions provoked.

Korean American students experience invisibility and silence as their culture and presence remain outwardly invisible in the mainstream culture of US high schools. This is further exacerbated by the silent response of the dominant population of the school towards these issues. Yet, to an extent, Korean American students find a sense of comfort within that invisibility; less visibility allows more silence and thus more privacy. This qualitative in-depth interview study focuses on developing understandings of Korean American students' perceptions and negotiations of education in suburban American schools, specifically through the perceptions of two Korean American female students. When viewed through Bakhtinian perspectives of silence, this invisibility becomes prominent, lending insight into the ways invisibility and silence are both seen as problematic and openly cultivated by these students.

Authors Fecho, Coombs, and McAuley discuss the integral role of dialogue in literacy classrooms dominated by standardized testing, curriculum, and instruction. Their argument in support of the dialogical literacy classroom begins with a historical and theoretical justification for these principles, then transitions into a discussion of the troubling condition of schools as a result of the current lack of dialogue. By including the voices of students and teachers, the authors offer glimpses into classrooms in need of dialogical transactions. This commentary concludes with a call to teachers, policy makers, and community members to consider what educators risk when they fail to open up classrooms as places where diverse perspectives can be heard and individual meaning can be made of the texts of students' lives. In addition, the authors argue here that establishing a critical dialogue in literacy classrooms is needed, perhaps now more than at any time in our past.

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us, nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings, new and veteran teachers in the profession will have few if any sustained experiences upon which to base their own dialogical classrooms. Moreover, to either deny that tensions exist or to struggle to eradicate them is to misunderstand the purpose and possibility of tension. Learners caught between stabilizing and destabilizing tensions enter a state of wobble, one that asks them to pay attention to the issues at hand and to author a response. The goal is not to remove oneself from that tension but instead to enter into a dialogue that, like the cables on a suspension bridge, uses tension for support and equilibrium.

Students and teachers inevitably enter classrooms with differing expectations and experiences; those differences provide opportunities for both conflict and growth. This article examines this phenomenon in an undergraduate teacher education course on reading instruction at the middle-school level, presents case studies of students' improvisations in the face of this tension, and makes implications for teachers and for teacher education regarding these types of conflicts. Students in the course were middle-school education majors and speech pathology majors; the educational backgrounds and identities of these students presented lack of fit with each other and, for some, with the inquiry-based nature of the course pedagogy. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain's (1998) concept of figured worlds, our case studies present one speech pathology major--Kathryn--and one middle school major--Allie--both of whom were successful in improvising their own ways through the conflict between their backgrounds and the differing requirements and content of the reading education course. We also provide implications for teachers and teacher educators who face similar disjoints between their own figured worlds and those experienced in classrooms.

Bakhtin's language theories give educators a view into how people develop and communicate with language through dialogue. These conceptions can be applied to teaching in a variety of positive ways. The authors explore how teaching based on Bakhtinian concepts might function in the classroom, paying particular attention to the concepts of dialogue, heteroglossia, carnival, and hybridity. Although they do not provide a specific model, they refer to five pedagogical practices that might take place: (1) Raising questions and authoring responses by and among all participants; (2) Embracing the importance of context and the non-neutrality of language; (3) Encouraging multiples perspectives; (4) Flattening or creating disturbance within existing hierarchies; (5) Agreeing that learning is under construction and evolving rather than reified and static. The authors argue that a dialogic classroom is one where language is central to a meaning-making process that, in turn, informs us about language. By opening up dialogue within classroom contexts by reference to Bakhtinian theories, the authors see opportunities for increased student engagement, more voices within classrooms, and more invigorating academic activities.

In this article, the authors--the teacher educators who obtained a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD)--explore what it meant for teachers and teacher educators involved in the PorTRAIT (Practitioner or Teacher Researchers As Inquiring Travelers) program to enlarge their views of teacher research and their own classrooms by being part of a larger research community. In particular, they examine this work through the concept of figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). Using this lens, they describe and discuss some of the figured worlds participants brought into the program, the ones the teacher researchers and teacher educators co-constructed, and what these transactions meant in terms of practice, research, and collaboration. In particular, they examine what they call "the wobble," that authored space of uncertainty that lies between and among figured worlds, to argue that coming to an appreciation of this unsettling state of vertigo creates opportunities for examining practice in ways that might not otherwise occur.

In this article, the authors show how two first year teachers a continent apart--Kim in the village of Tununak on the Bering Sea in Alaska and Chris in Beaufort, South Carolina, on the Atlantic Ocean--were able to take inquiry stances on their classrooms. In particular, through analysis of e-mails written in Chris' and Kim's first years of teaching, the authors also show ways in which the students they taught inquired into their lives and that of others around them. However, more to the point, they describe how Kim and Chris used inquiry to reflect on their practice and to develop deeper and more useful understandings of their students and their cultures. The intent of this work is to make an argument that first year teachers are not only capable of enacting critical inquiry in their classrooms, but, by doing so, they enable their first year practice.

Although he may not have spoken quite as eloquently as the Bard of Avon, Ernie Page, the author's methods instructor at Penn State, once said that teaching English was less a subject and more a predicament. He was alluding to the many complexities and range of subject matter that constitute teaching the English language arts. In the 30 years since the author first heard those words, teaching in general and, more specifically, teaching language arts at any level has taken on much greater complexity. English classrooms now focus more purposefully on sociocultural, sociohistorical, and sociopolitical concerns, even as greater responsibility has been ascribed to those classrooms via the hegemonic predominance of high stakes standardized testing. And, as most teachers will testify, the rise in expectations for teachers and students in English classrooms has been accompanied by a decrease in time, support, and inclusion of teacher voice in classroom decision-making. Over the last two years, those on the CEE Executive Committee have wondered about the state of methods courses in the US, those courses that specifically address how, what, and why to teach in English/language arts classrooms. Their interest has been driven by a range of questions. There was a feeling within the CEE Executive Committee that through an investigation of something as basic to their mission as methods courses, those in the field of literacy teacher education could better understand these developing complexities and author some insight into their implications for teachers and teacher educators alike. This article describes the day-long colloquium which the CEE Executive Committee authorized and developed. Designed as an interactive workshop, the colloquium gathered together a number of teacher educators in order to generate the range of what methods courses might look like, what concerns this range addressed, and what issues remained.

A high school teacher and former student use the student's writing to discuss identity construction and how it is connected to literacy. They describe literacy practices as existential acts through which they seek to ascribe purpose and meaning. (Contains 17 references.) (SK)

Explores a range of ways that threat can exist and be transcended in a critical inquiry classroom by examining vignettes taken from one intensive inquiry project conducted in an urban high school English classroom. Concludes that educators need to acknowledge the ways stakeholders may feel threatened and to provide means for interrogating those transactions. (SG)

Describes a teacher-research study using interpretive methods to address the question how learning about language connects secondary students to their world. Profiles three student inquirers, finding the students deepened their awareness of the role language plays in their lives. (NH)

Argues for an ecological approach to supporting beginning teachers in critical inquiry classrooms, bridging the end of college with the beginning of teaching. School-university partnerships supporting reflective practices by creating large numbers of inquiry-based educators within school districts are needed. Journal entries from a student teacher who participated in a small learning community using critical inquiry principles are presented. (SM)

Presents a qualitative study that problematizes the authors' classroom authority as they sought to enact critical inquiries with preservice teachers. Contends that preservice teachers must face the reality of having to function as authority figures while still maintaining a classroom conducive to meaning making. Provides three lenses through which to explore how authority can be reimagined in critical-inquiry reading education courses. (RS)