Literacy Learning and Relationship Building through Dialogue Journals.

In recent years, teacher education curriculum has become more focused on the "back to basics" issue of teaching, encouraging teachers to manipulate students and classroom environments to attain one goal: academic learning. Critics claim this narrowing of the teacher education process has led to negative social consequences where children are represented as things or raw material to be made into finished products. Following Urie Bronfenbrenner's suggestion that preservice teachers should have opportunities to enter into relationships with their students, and school curriculum should integrate academic learning with prosocial or altruistic development, the elementary teacher education program at the University of Georgia assigned daily dialogue journals to be written between each student teacher and a young student to provide the student teacher with a vehicle for entering into and developing a relationship with a student in a limited period of time. Daily entries were made in the journal (notebook) by both the student teacher and the child, with the student teacher instructed not to correct the entry or use it for didactic purposes. Although early entries tended to be superficial in many respects, later journal entries indicated that a sense of trust and rapport was beginning to emerge between journal partners at the same time skills in written communication were being promoted. (NH)