Dialogue as Love, Humility, Faith, Hope, and Critical Thinking: Possibilities and Challenges in Teacher Education

• In Event: Dreaming and Living Emancipatory Educational Space: Studying Mediation and Learning in Freirean Pedagogy

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines the dialogic possibilities and challenges that emerged in a teacher education social foundations course where the instructor and students purposefully attempted to unsettle normative patterns of classrooms discourse and engage, instead, in dialogue from a place of love, humility, faith, hope, and critical thinking (Freire, 1970).

Conceptual Framework

Common classroom practices in U.S. schooling tend to marginalize and erase non-dominant knowledges and epistemologies (Gutiérrez et al., 2001; Rosebery et al., 2010). Within this backdrop of how teachers and students have been socialized to engage in classroom discourse, dialogue about power and oppression, and toward liberation and justice, become even more demanding as it is undermined by patterns of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011), constricted notions of criticality (Author & Colleague, 2016), and dogmatic practices in social justice activism (Lee, 2017).

Data and Methods

Three categories of data were collected and analyzed for this study. First, students were interviewed at the end of the quarter about their experiences in the course. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed for themes across participants as well as particularities among the participants through structural coding techniques (Guest et al., 2012; Namey et al., 2008). Second, student assignments from the academic quarter, including weekly reflections, were collected. These documents were interpreted as “social products” that reflect the interests, perspectives, values, and ideologies of students (Saldaña, 2012). The artifacts were analyzed through an iterative process of thematic analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006). Finally, audio-recorded class discussions were analyzed for how students’ understandings of and engagement with Freirian dialogue shifted through a lens of microgenetic learning (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013) and interaction (Goodwin, 2007; Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

Findings

Throughout the academic quarter, students and the instructor repeatedly referenced the discussion, on the first day of class, about embracing Freire’s (1970) invitation to ground dialogue in love, humility, faith, hope, and critical thinking as necessary and powerful forms of prefiguration (Yates, 2014; Zavala & Asher Golden, 2016). They used this lens to reflect, often in the moment, on how the participants were collectively constructing meaning. It allowed for ways to re-imagine learning and the deepening of an analysis outside of the dominant discourse practice of winning an argument by rendering an “opponent’s” claim invalid or insufficient.

Students also rejected Freire’s (1970) conceptualization of dialogue, on occasion, as inadequate to the political goals of the classroom. For some, it was a recognition that Freire’s writings were historically specific, and that the participants in this course had to redefine oppression, the oppressed, and the oppressor, in contextually meaningful ways that accounted for intersectionality and their situated nature. Others, frustrated by what they saw as insufficiently radical stances by their peers, dismissed Freire’s invitation as politically stagnant. Yet others used Freire’s language to center their own socially-privileged positions and evade an analysis of power.

Significance

Prefiguration is by definition a feature of an intentional community. This study highlights the possibilities and challenges of creating shared intention and prefigurative politics within institutional spaces that are partially stipulated.

Author

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Los Angeles