Significance to Future Practice

 

The following affordances and challenges of dialogic teaching and learning were reported
by students in the free-response portion of the dialogism survey.

 

Affordances

• "I have learned how others think and make connections that is a different way from how I think."​

• "I went from writing to talking.  Wasn't that drastic of a change."

• "I learn a lot."

• "I definitely think that I was really quiet in the beginning of these years and I have gotten better from these activities of English 2."

• "It's cool."

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Challenges

• "I HATE IT."​

• "It just seems a bit awkward talking to people that I don't ever talk to."

• "I don't really like group work because at the end only one person [does] the work."

• "It was something new that I never really experienced and I had to jump right into it, so I didn't really enjoy it."

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Contributions to Inquiry

Even without an extensive empirical survey of models of learning that my students have experienced, as expected, I can tell by students' reactions to a student-driven dialogic classroom that most of their learning––their conception of "normal"/"traditional" learning––involved teacher-driven monologic learning. Students feel "awkward" when they have to use their voices as learning tools, "something new" that many students had "never really experienced." Subsequently, and understandably, students have strong reactions to dialogism: dialogism makes them feel socially anxious or even what they believe to be "HATE." A majority of students even perceive monologic learning as "more effective" (question 8).

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But ultimately, a majority of students consider dialogic learning a worthwhile skill, wish that more of their classes were dialogic, and are willing to endure the social anxiety triggered by dialogism to become better at dialogic skills (questions 6, 12, and 14). Dialogic teaching and learning is more difficult than the norm, for a variety of reasons (e.g. additional prep; nontraditional yet necessary schemas; social/relational contingencies otherwise negligible in monologic classrooms, et al.) (question 2). Nevertheless, a majority of students' cost-benefit analyses of dialogic teaching and learning indicate that the model demands are worth the struggle and discomfort.

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Of course, an equitable approach to education cannot ignore the minority of students who do not enjoy or struggle comparatively more more with dialogism. The ELA classroom is, theoretically and according to School-District-of-Philadelphia standards, three-pronged: ELA content areas comprise 1) reading, 2) writing, and 3) speaking and listening. As advant-garde and worthwhile as dialogic teaching and learning might be, dialogism (e.g. speaking and listening) cannot dominate design of students' performance tasks: an even blend of reading tasks, writing tasks, and speaking and listening tasks and likely the most ideal set of expectations for students. After all, as Dr. Mary J. Schleppegrell (2001) from the University of California, Davis determines, "When we contrast informal, interactional language with the kind of language children encounter at school, we find significant grammatical differences" (p. 454). Grading speaking and listening ostensibly allows instructors to validate those differences––as opposed to assessing and tasking students strictly with reading and writing tasks that inherently and often unavoidably sit in "school-based genres" (p. 441). Such a blend respects a class's inevitably diverse sets of strengths, weaknesses, learning styles, and communication styles.

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