Dialogic Curriculum Teaching and Learning in a Multicultural Society

9780867093650

086709365X

Stock journeys into the classroom for the explicit purpose of attaching new meanings to the dialogic classroom, meanings which uphold the interests of students and teachers over those administrative bureaucrats. - North Carolina English Teacher The Dialogic Curriculum is about journey and quest students and teachers in deep dialogues, working to thematize their experiences and to find forms of articulation for them. Patricia Lambert Stock invites you into two twelfth grade classes where she and her colleagues taught literature by asking students to read and write about subjects that mattered to them. The result is both a richly detailed portrait of inquiry based, integrated language arts teaching and a theory of curriculum. Convinced that teachers' plans remain just that unless students translate them into their own intellectual projects, Stock presents a course of study that builds upon students' existing understandings and skills. As you travel with Stock and her students across a year-long English course, you overhear teachers planning and observe students reading, writing, and talking, and you see students expand their experiences and literacy and return their enriched understanding to their home community. The Dialogic Curriculum features relatively brief case histories and writing segments throughout, but the centerpiece is an extended exploration of one student's development, "Wendy Gunlock's Intellectual Project." Stock and her colleagues asked Wendy to write about her major life concerns with an implied promise that by interpreting what she was saying, these teachers would enable her to write more communicatively and express herself more authentically. The fourteen examples of Wendy's essays included here become strikingly more detailed, more shapely, more thoughtful, and more perceptive over time. The book ends with an approach to teacher research as storytelling: a challenge to objectivism and abstractness in educational research, an affirmation that teacher research is far more than anecdotal. The questions remain open, but the dialogue is all the richer as you discover what story can do. This is the only full-length book that simultaneously argues for, theorizes, and presents teacher research.