Bucking the authoritative script of a mandated curriculum

ABSTRACT

Dialogic teaching represents an orientation toward classroom dialogue that surfaces student ideas, allows students to encounter and dialogue with each other's ideas, and privileges divergent understandings. This orientation shows considerable pedagogical promise. Yet, particularly in schools serving economically marginalized and/or linguistically diverse students, teachers are often obliged to use mandated reading curricula that emphasize knowledge transmission and single textual understandings – highly authoritative teaching that stands in contrast to dialogic teaching goals. In order to understand how teachers might pursue dialogic teaching within such a curricular context, we examine a second-grade bilingual teacher with strong commitment to dialogic teaching goals. We first analyze the mandated curriculum, finding that its recommendations for instruction were indeed mostly authoritative. By analyzing teacher interviews, however, we found that the teacher was able to teach toward dialogic goals by using the mandated materials with his students in ways that deviated from the curricular recommendations. Factors that may have supported this included his clear goal orientation and the tacit permission of his principal. This study provides an encouraging indication that student-centred dialogic teaching can exist in the context of a mandated curriculum that might appear at first glance to leave little room for dialogue among student voices.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• culture and literacy
• student and teacher experiences
• pedagogical orientations
• curriculum studies

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the teacher, students, and administration at the school where this study was conducted, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments shaping the revisions of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All references to OCR refer to Open Court Reading, the English version of the curriculum, because the teacher typically referred to the curriculum that way. All exact citations come from the first of the (six) volumes of the OCR Teacher's Edition. Foro abierto para la lectura is a direct translation of OCR.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maren Aukerman

Maren Aukerman is an assistant professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary and a former bilingual teacher. She is the recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, which helped support this research, and also received the 2009 Albert J. Harris Award for her Research in the Teaching of English article: “When reading it wrong is getting it right: Shared evaluation pedagogy among struggling fifth grade readers.” Her research focuses on how students make meaning from text in conversation with others, and how teachers can better facilitate talk that makes authentic room for student voices. She can be contacted at: Werklund School of Education 2750 University Way N.W. University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4.

Lorien Chambers Schuldt

Lorien Chambers Schuldt is an assistant professor of Teacher Education at Fort Lewis College and a former elementary classroom teacher. She received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Her research focuses on teacher–student interactions during literacy instruction and the ways that these interactions can support students to engage in authentic reading and writing. She can be contacted at: Fort Lewis College Department of Teacher Education, 1000 Rim Drive, Durango, CO 810301.