Communicative interaction in the dialogic classroom: Identifying and accommodating impediments to dialogue.

Abstract

The growing popularity of dialogic teaching strategies in composition pedagogy invites careful analyses of the approach's claims, expectations, and effects. This dissertation chronicles an example of reflexive teacher research as it examines ways in which dialogic interaction fails, identifies a set of impediments to dialogue, and explores alternative strategies for overcoming those impediments. Dialogic pedagogies use interactive, multi-perspective dialogue to empower participants and encourage reflective exploration as an instructional method that mirrors real-life communicative interactions. However, despite the invitations to dialogue offered, students often choose not to participate. This inquiry focuses on impediments to dialogue. It asks why some students participate actively while others do not. What classroom structures or strategies enable dialogue and what impede it? This study considers several forms of dialogic pedagogies and their criticisms by using participant observation and instructional-ethnographic analysis of videotape from dialogic classrooms to interrogate the relationships of pedagogic choices and student participation. Those dialogic pedagogies include critical, contact-zone, Deweyan cooperative, social epistemic, Bakhtinian, collaborative, hermeneutic, and paralogic. The analysis begins with critical pedagogies, based in Freirean dialogics that focus on critical consciousness raising in students. Using a recursive evaluation of two first-year college classes, the analysis suggests consciousness raising itself presents a serious impediment to dialogue through its imposition of teacher and disciplinary authority. As one alternative, the study considers the Bakhtinian approach of encouraging ideological becoming. Rather than evaluating and altering the students' specific interpretations of the world, this approach addresses the students' willingness and ability to engage other voices and respond to them. An observational study of a first-year composition class using a Bakhtinian dialogic approach finds that students will resist authoritative discourse only if they perceive the risks of academic failure to be sufficiently small. Alternatively, Thomas Kent's paralogic approach, because it begins with an expectation of difference and misunderstanding in all communication, pushes Bakhtin's concept further. Since paralogism insists there can be no teachable system of writing, it avoids the imposition of teacher authority as students develop communicative proficiency. By designing the classroom as a series of communicative challenges, parology encourages fully dialogic interactions.