Fostering Dialogue and Active Participation in the University Classroom

1. Fostering Dialogue and Active Participation in the University Classroom Dr. Sarah Twomey Curriculum Studies, College of Education, University of Hawaii

2. Outline of Talk • Introductions • Rationale • Barriers/Challenges to Dialogue • Questions/Discussion

3. Rationale • Education as a social process that allows free dialogue and sharing of experience as a cornerstone of democracy. (Dewey, 1916) “Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.”

4. Critical Pedagogy • Student as “silent observer” • “Banking” concept of education • “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.” (Freire, 1993)

5. Learning Through Dialogue • “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (Freire, 1993)

6. Feminist Pedagogy • “We are all subjects in history. We must return ourselves to a state of embodiment in order to deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated in the classroom, denying subjectivity to some groups and according it to others.” (hooks, 1994)

7. Instructor Role • How to establish classroom settings where silenced voices can be heard into speech by people committed to serious listening? (Palmer, 1990)

8. Setting Expectations

9. Make Connections • Structuring ways for students to get to know each other. • Interviews • Name origins • Pair and Share • Partner journals • Reader responses

10. Group Assignments • Build this into your curriculum • Make it part of your grading system • DQ • Inquiry Projects

11. Facilitating ‘Community’ • Setting Expectations • Providing Opportunities for Leadership • Knowing your Students • Differentiating your instruction

12. Knowing Your Students • Recognizing cultural differences. • Giving students choice. • Modifying yourself. • Providing rehearsal strategies for participation: • Free writes • Reader response column

13. Challenges • Cultural, social, and linguistic differences. • Finding a comfortable authority. • Dominant voices. • Silence.

14. What makes a person a political being, is their faculty of action; it enables one to get together with peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter one’s mind, let alone the desires of the heart. (Hannah Arendt, 1960)

15. As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. bell hooks (1994)

16. Listening is one way of finding how to get to the new place where we can all live and speak to each other for more than a fragile moment. Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984)