Dialogical Texts: Examining Literacy Practices in Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Freireian Dilemmas: Confronting Contradictions in the Practice of Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Action Research in Undergraduate Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives:

What are the affordances, limitations, and consequences of engaging in specific textual practices to facilitate Participatory Action Research (PAR)? This paper examines literacy practices and textual production in PAR, emphasizing their centrality in the dialogical process of pedagogy and research. Drawing on qualitative data collected in an undergraduate course that uses PAR curriculum, this paper examines tensions and contradictions associated with particular practices of textual consumption, design, production, and dissemination.

Theoretical Framework:

Bakhtin (1986) states that individual contributions, or “utterances”, to dialogue could comprise of a range of offerings – a single oral word or an entire novel. Describing his program of liberatory education and inquiry, Freire (1970) discusses the importance of utilizing a variety of media and genres to sustain dialogue. He highlights the importance of using, producing, and disseminating “didactic materials” to aid students in reflecting on and transforming their material, cultural, and social conditions (p. 115). This paper looks closely at “didactic materials”, or more generally, the “texts” and textual practices within the scope of a PAR curriculum, which draws heavily on Freireian theory (Fals Borda, 1991; Grace and Langhout, 2014). Genre, as a social, cultural, and historical practice, provides a useful framework for examining textual practice (Briggs and Bauman, 1992; Hanks, 1987). Genres serve “as containers for discourse in use” that “appear neutral” but are “ideological” (Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2014). Textual practice in PAR thus becomes a location in which to interrogate the ideological work that educators and students engage in.

Methods and Data Sources:

Data sources for this project are primarily qualitative and consist of researcher field notes, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis of instructor-designed and student-generated texts in conventional print and electronic formats. These multiple data sources were triangulated and analyzed using open-ended and focused thematic coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005). Through these analyses we elucidate the nature of individuals’ and groups’ engagement with textual practices as shaped by the PAR framework that characterized the course curriculum. Additionally, we highlight the ideological work that students engage in through textual practices.

Preliminary Findings and Scholarly Significance:

This project finds that students initially come to class with conventional positivist notions of research. In engaging with PAR processes and presenting results of research in textual products, students find difficulty negotiating the tension to report results “objectively” and “neutrally", while also attending to the openly political work of PAR. Negotiating this tension in textual production, students develop a reflexive capacity, becoming aware of their positionality as constructors of knowledge. They begin to understand the relationship between PAR, genre, and audience. This paper aims to help PAR practitioners reflect on and improve practices of textual production and dissemination, an under-theorized component of PAR (Fine and Torre, 2007). While existing literature describes the different texts and media generated through PAR, few closely examine the affordances, limitations, and consequences of working with particular texts; few also recognize the dialogical qualities of texts produced.

Author

• Exequiel Sabino Ganding, University of California - Berkeley