Black Boys and Dialogic Literacy Experiences: The Nuances to Communal Learning Experiences and Spaces

• In Event: Researchers Building: Advancing the Literate Identities of Black Students Across Multiple Sites and Spaces

Abstract

Thought-provoking texts coupled with dialogue can bring about sustained change, lead to moments of enlightenment, realisation, or a paradigm shift (Fisher, 2008; Tatum, 2009). This notion inspired me to expound on the dialogic components of the exponential-growth literacy model that I saw emerge in classroom discussions.
Therefore, I recruited seven elementary-aged Black boys from a Summer Academic Program (SAP) that took place at an urban university. The 5-week study was designed to examine how dialogism (Bakhtin, 1986) could shape Black boys’ relationships with texts. I focused on three components of dialogism: dialogic talk, dialogic reading (PEER), and dialogic instruction. Employing Wortham and Reyes’ (2015) discourse analysis, guided by dialogism (Bakhtin, 1986) to code the pre-interviews, post-interviews, student artefacts, and video recordings, I placed a special emphasis on questioning as part of dialogic reading. To do this, I analysed 15 hours of my video recorded classroom discussions to gauge how dialogue fostered the boys' literacy learning.
Through my explicit focus on dialogue and questioning, I found that the boys exhibited a nuanced communal learning experience. Most boys expressed an interest in sharing their thoughts and hearing other people’s thoughts, but some were more hesitant, and exhibited a preference for an intimate communal learning (one-to-one). The boys also expressed the desire for each other to learn from the text “He didn’t write questions. You need those to help. To help…talk about what he learned…”. Occasionally, some commented to other boys “we are waiting on you”; The boys became a community of readers who wanted to further each other’s reading, learning, and writing. They started to understand that they were not just participating, they were shaping the dialogic discussions.
This finding speaks to an important factor about learning: for it to be optimal, it is best not to do it alone; it is a social and communal activity (Allen & Boykin, 1992; Gadsden, 1993). The boys started to use phrases like “I agree with” “or to add to what he said”. It shows that the communal learning space helped the boys to hold each other accountable for each other’s learning, especially through dialogic conversation and building on each other’s thoughts and ideas.
The boys became literacy citizens, and together they cared about their reading practice, as well as the meaning they were making from the text.

Author

• Mellissa Gyimah-Concepcion, Elgin Community College