Using Critical Dialogic Education to Center Multiple Perspectives on American History in a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom (Poster 6)

• In Event: Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Social Studies: Research and Practice With and for Multilingual Youth

Abstract

The increased presence of multilingual youth in American K-12 classrooms, coupled with their inherent worth as deserving of an equitable education, mandates that teachers serve this population more effectively. Pertaining to social studies and history education, this requires teachers to be allies and co-conspirators (Love, 2019) as these students become active participants in a democracy that has excluded them.
One way teachers can fulfill this goal is by creating opportunities for dialogues that communicate to their multilingual students that they are valued and validated in their language use in the classroom. In our presentation, we will examine how two high school teachers of an American history class that was 90% non-White and 40% EL-classified leveraged their students’ multilingual skills to facilitate their curricular encounters and prepare them to view history from multiple, critical perspectives.
Multiple perspective-taking is seen as essential to history education if it is to meet its goal of expanding students’ historical understandings (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Barton & McCully, 2005, 2010). But it is also a practice that can meet another goal of social studies education—to transform society. By creating an environment where non-English languages and non-standardized versions of English were welcomed, our participant teachers allowed their students to use their linguistic backgrounds as tools to center multiple perspectives on historical events. This allowed for the replacement of a single, dominant perspective of history (Authors, 2020, 2021; Banks, 2013; Joseph, 2011) and of traditional linguistic practices that have historically marginalized multilingual students in the classroom (e.g., Gay, 2010; Marshall & Rossman, 2011).
As a result, we viewed our participant teachers’ practices as instantiations of critical dialogic education (CDE; Authors, 2020). A dialogic approach to education relies on sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) to view learning and knowledge as cocreations between individuals (Lefstein & Snell, 2014), with dialogue as mediator (Sfard, 2015). However, Authors (2020) have argued that inadequate concern for equity in dialogic education is problematic from a social justice standpoint and can also preclude either of those goals from being met. Viewing our data through the lens of CDE brings a fresh perspective to the examination of teaching practices, both individually and on the whole, and allows us to critically analyze pedagogy surrounding student language use and acceptance as a vehicle through which the dominant version of history and the traditional ideas of appropriate classroom language use and dialogue can be challenged, resulting in a disruption of the single dominant narrative that schools often facilitate. To illustrate this complex relationship, we will provide examples from observational data of how these teachers centered diverse perspectives on history and valued varied language use as both a practice of inherent worth and a mechanism for facilitating curricular encounters and historical learning. We will also discuss implications for teachers who seek to prepare their multilingual students for success both inside and outside the classroom as rightful and transformative members of a democracy that often does not value their presence or participation.

Authors

• Vonna Hemmler, Amherst College

• Colleen Fitzpatrick, University of Toledo