Running to Text: Engaging Teachers in Dialogic Dramatic Inquiry to “See” Equality in Reading Education

• In Event: Reading as Possibility: Constructing a New Theoretical and Empirical Foundation for Equity and Imagination in Reading Education

Abstract

This presentation is based on the poststructural method of telling ‘philosophical tales’ developed by philosopher Jacques Ranciére (2009; Davis 2010; Bingham & Biesta 2010) who conceptualized the ‘presupposition of equality’ as the heart of all encounters in education. Philosophical tales are constructed from available documents as fictionalized narratives, in order to ask the question “Where are we now?” In a symposium on reading, a philosophy of seeing might be viewed as an esoteric addendum; and yet a well-developed philosophy of learning and democracy can transform what we set out to do in our work as teacher educators and scholars.
The stories we tell are based on a semester-long reading clinic-based course, designed by the presenters to immerse practicing teachers in analyzing and developing pedagogies that would support the specific needs of the 5-10 year-old children who were recommended for reading remediation. Working with an analytic or philosophical tale of one teacher’s interpretation of what she could see, and her sense of feeling ‘beyond frustrated’, we illustrate how complex texts may be encountered by everyone ‘on the stage’ of learning with an equality of intelligence. We contrast the ‘incompetence’ this teacher ‘saw’ in children, based on a presupposition of inequality, with the competence the children demonstrated through a pedagogy premised on equality. Through Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of dialogism, addressivity, and answerability, we account for those moments when she began to ‘see’ children as equal and when she was addressed by peers (and documentation) to ‘answer’ what had previously been ‘unseen.’
Our tales are propositions and questions, rather than findings; these include 1) is a pedagogy possible that thinks students and teachers can make sense of fictional and real life scenes, as people of equal intelligence? 2) how might such a pedagogy open new scenes or stagings of democracy in reading education? 3) what, how, when, and where might readers see themselves as equal with stories in ways that keep the stories, and their relationship to the stories, in motion?

Authors

• Brian W. Edmiston, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Meredith Whittaker