Learning From Youth Researchers Documenting Critical Dialogic Education: Roles, Practices, and Responsibilities

• In Event: Critical Dialogic Education: Sustaining Inclusive Discourse Practices in U.S. Schools

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
We present learnings from jointly exploring critical dialogic education (CDE) with a group of linguistically marginalized youth as co-researchers. While it is easy to advocate taking youth perspectives seriously, it is more challenging to find examples of university researchers and teacher-researchers fundamentally shifting their assumptions and changing professional practice as a result of learning from youth. Here we first highlight youth-generated knowledge about critical dialogue in the classroom, then analyze some impact of their knowledge on our teaching and research.

Theoretical Framework
Our work centers sociocultural understandings of discourse (Cazden, 2018) and scholarship on critical language awareness (Fairclough, 2013), emphasizing contexts, practices, and resources that enable students and teachers to challenge deficit perspectives and cultivate agentive identities. We also theorize youth research as a methodology enabling them to examine aspects of their practice and identities as learners.

Methods
Our intergenerational research team comprised multilingual youth, their classroom teacher, and university-based researchers. We met weekly after school to research Poetry Inside Out (PIO), a poetry-translation curriculum. Because PIO centers dialogue, youths’ research questions have centered on talk, for example, “What’s happening in group talk when students learn about the meaning of the poem or about each other?”

When PIO takes place in the youth researchers’ classroom, they record small and whole-group discussions. Outside of class, youth conduct interviews with selected classmates, and transcribe and analyze audio files of class discussion and interviews, employing practitioner inquiry methodologies (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Data Sources
Our data come from multiple years of the intergenerational research group, and from our own teaching and research, including audio-recordings, transcripts, interview data and artifacts.

Results
Through our intergenerational research process, the youth generated knowledge about what constitutes, motivates, and sustains critical dialogue. According to the youth, for critical dialogic education to occur, all parties must practice “Special Listening” -- actively and interactively listening with ears, eyes, mind, one’s history, culture, languages. The second construct is the “Third-Party Bridge,” referring to a third person (student or teacher) who can act as a translator and mediator of meaning when interactions break down.

We will share ways these constructs reshaped our own fundamental assumptions and practices. In researching a secondary biology class for emergent bilinguals, we’ve utilized the construct “third-party bridge” to tag and then code a very large corpus of qualitative data (video, fieldnotes, and transcripts). In another example, in teaching pre- and in-service educators, we identified not just the affordances, but the interpersonal and inter-racial complexities of foregrounding “special listening” as a foundation and goal of any classroom talk culture.

Scholarly Significance
Our session offers theoretical and practice-based insights -- ways of working with youth and guiding them through complex discourse analysis and language research, or ways of conceptualizing classroom interactions through concepts like “Special Listening” and the “Third-Party Bridge.” We also offer a way of understanding the conference theme of “accepting educational responsibility.” Our responsibility is not only to authorize youth perspectives on critical dialogic education, but to leverage their insights in reconfiguring our research and teaching.

Authors

• Jie Park, Clark University

• Sarah Michaels, Clark University

• Catherine O'Connor, Boston University

• Lori Simpson, Worcester Public Schools

• Carlos Hernandez, Claremont Academy

• Sandra Hernandez, Claremont Academy

• Olivia Isom, Clark University

• Tung Nguyen, Claremont Academy