Critical dialogic education with multilingual immigrant youth: propositions for teacher learning

Recent scholarship in democratic education has expanded the field’s longstanding focus on classroom discourse by stressing the importance of Critical Dialogic Education (CDE), especially in classrooms with increasingly transnational, translingual dynamics. This article builds on that line of inquiry, examining how a novice high school civics teacher learns to facilitate dialogues with eight multilingual immigrant students. Together we established an 8-month partnership centered on an afterschool enrichment program for student dialogues, which doubled as the teacher’s professional learning lab. Qualitative analysis of 14 teacher interviews, six after-school dialogue sessions with students, and field notes from nine daylong field observations revealed differences between students’ discourse during in-class discussions and after-school dialogues. Those differences were driven in part by the teacher’s ideals about the qualities of a good discussion, which tied back to her own memories of classroom discussions as a student. Additionally, patterns in student participation were shaped by (and shaped) the teacher’s evolving repertoire of discussion facilitation techniques. Finally, enacting dialogic pedagogy expanded the teacher’s understanding about the range of roles that she and her students could inhabit during classroom discussions. From these findings, I generate three propositions to guide future work on teacher professional development for Critical Dialogic Education.