Dialogical classrooms are rare, not necessarily unicorns, but rare enough that there is so much talk recently, but little action. The dialogical classroom is liberatory education. For the lack of a better term, it is a mindset of the classroom educator and students. “Emancipating Classrooms: The Necessity of Dialogic Pedagogy” is a paper that I am currently developing with Charlene Holkenbrink-Monk (Dignified Learning Project). As classmates in the doctoral program at SDSU/CGU, we began to think as to why it is much talked about, yet misunderstood and not implemented. The more we thought about the “methods” for implementation, we further thought that it is not a method to be implemented, but a truly democratic classroom where teachers and students know the purpose of dialogue in the classroom.
We will present the paper this April at an education conference at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and we are working towards publishing the paper. Stay up-to-date with this blog, and I will put forward the ideas that Charlene and I are working on regarding the importance of classroom action.
OutSpoken ELA 