The challenge of inclusive dialogic teaching in public secondary school

Abstract

The challenge of creating more inclusive public schools addressing the needs of the 21st century Knowledge Society is a major one. In this paper, we focus on inclusion as a dialogical process to be adopted and developed by teachers and students alike in any classroom. The idea of inclusive dialogic teaching is explained and operationalised in an inclusive dialogic curriculum focusing on cultural literacy learning dispositions. In this study, which is part of a multi-country European project, eight Spanish and Portuguese secondary school teachers and their students participated in eight sessions performing dialogic lesson plans. Teachers attended two professional development sessions, one at the beginning of the project and another one later on. Classroom discourse data from sessions #3 and #8 were collected and analyzed using a pre-constructed coding scheme. The findings show a slight improvement in dialogicity from session #3 to session #8 with a persisting resistance from teachers to be more cumulative in their discourse. These findings confirm previous work showing that dialogic teaching is acquired gradually, and even when there are changes in teachers’ stance being more inclusive and inviting towards students, these changes do not necessarily represent a radical shift in the teaching methods towards being more student-centered.