Dialogic Education With Immigrant Families as Resistance to Assimilationist Schooling

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Foregrounding Silenced Voices: Understanding and Supporting Schools' and Teachers' Engagement With Linguistically Marginalized Families

Abstract

Objective
In this case study, Teresa, a Latina secondary science teacher, reflects on her experiences with her students and their families in a community-based science learning program that served as the basis for her resistance to assimilationist practices in her school. Teresa’s goal was to strengthen her dialogue-based science learning interactions with her students and their parents, both in and beyond school. Our goal, as researchers, was to better understand the potential for dialogic learning communities when working with immigrant students, their families, and their teachers.

Theoretical Framework, Data Sources, and Methods
Paulo Freire’s (1970, 1998, 2013) principles of dialogic education were central to our thinking as we worked with secondary science teachers, their Latinx students, and those students’ families in the context of a four-year, multi-faceted teacher professional learning project. We engaged with project participants in aspects of dialogic education that included a focus on: humility, care, hope, and critical awareness. The research question that frames this study is: How did one focal teacher come to conceptualize the ways in which her participation in the project shaped her perspectives and practices as a science teacher working with Latinx students and their families?
Secondary science and ESOL teachers in the project came together with bilingual Latinx students from their schools and those students’ families around science learning experiences over multiple years as co-teachers and co-learners (Buxton et al., 2015). During each workshop, participants rotated through three activities: a family science investigation session; a family educational conversations session; and a college information session, followed by a communal lunch with informal conversation. Data sources included individual interviews with Teresa, focus group interviews, classroom observations in Teresa’s science classroom, and participant observations conducted during the family workshops. We engaged in narrative analysis of our data following Freeman’s (2017) inductive and deductive processes.

Findings & Significance
We found that the essential ingredients of dialogic education - humility, hope, care and critical awareness – allowed us to frame Teresa’s narrative about her changing perspectives and practices after attending the family workshops and other project professional learning activities. For example, over time, Teresa became better able to clearly articulate her critical analysis of her school context. This consciousness-raising led Teresa to be more hopeful about her ability to make changes, both in her classroom and in her school, to better welcome and support Latinx students and their families.
The National Science Foundation (2018) emphasizes broadening participation in science learning and careers as a central goal for science in the 21st Century (Ferrini-Mundy, 2013), but remains vague about how to support this goal. Our work attempts to be explicit about the changes needed if immigrant students and their families are to reach their full potential as science learners, such as changes within teacher professional learning programs and changes within science classrooms and schools. We argue that family engagement is a key aspect of broadening participation in science and that creating new opportunities for true dialogue among teachers, students, families and researchers must be central to such efforts.

Authors

• Cory A. Buxton, Oregon State University

• Martha A. Allexsaht-Snider, University of Georgia

• Mehtap Kirmaci, University of Georgia - Athens