Toward a Practice of Polyphonic Dialogue in Multicultural Teacher Education

Abstract

As the instructor of a multicultural education course for preservice teachers, I have attempted to guide my students in critiquing and reconceptualizing the deficit view of students, particularly minority students, endemic to the American school system. Yet I am faced with a dilemma: Is the fact that I believe my own students have deficit views of their future students not itself a deficit view, similar to the one I am trying to challenge? How can I escape this model of the teacher fixing the deficits of students in my own teaching? Bakhtin provides a framework within which I as a university professor can avoid the deficit trap with regard to my own students. Using a self-study methodology, this article analyzes ways in which adopting a pedagogy based on Bakhtin’s (1986, pp. 292–293; 1999) notions of dialogism and polyphony has shifted my own and my students’ participation patterns and describes some of the challenges I face in the continuous process of reflection on and redesign of my own teaching practice. After identifying potential patterns of dialogicity and developing some strategies for promoting these, I present a case study illustrating how these dialogic teaching strategies provided a framework for exploring heteronormativity.

Notes

Notes

1 I am following Matusov’s terminology, where “dialogicity” is a qualitative term to describe an aspect of true dialogue in any discourse and “dialogism” is a quantitative term to indicate the degree of dialogicity in discourse. The same system applies to the complementary terms monologicity and monologism (E. Matusov, personal communication, August 31, 2006).

2 Matusov is a Bakhtin scholar whose most recent publication is the book Journey Into Dialogic Pedagogy (2009b).

3 In this National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)—approved teacher education program, this course satisfies the university’s broader multicultural requirement and coincides with NCATE’s definition of a multicultural perspective: “An understanding of the social, political, economic, academic, and historical constructs of ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, gender, exceptionalities, language, religion, sexual orientation, and geographical area.” See http://www.ncate.org/public/glossary.asp?ch=143.

4 No student has ever identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or gender variant in all of the years I have taught this class. I attribute this to the enduring power of prejudice rather than to a statistical anomaly. During discussions about sexuality, students tended to either explicitly or implicitly (e.g., through use of pronouns) assert their heterosexuality.

5 I was not the only instructor teaching this class, so there will be different syllabi and different stated goals.

6 I use the term Black because this was actually one of the discussions he started: He refused to be called African American and engaged with students who wanted to discover the “correct” ethnic and racial terms.

7 The role of the addressee in shaping and advancing interactive discourse has been demonstrated, for example, in children’s social speech (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992) as well as classroom conversations involving teachers and children (Hayes, 2005; Hayes & Matusov, 2005a).

8 This describes me as well as the vast majority of my students. For an analysis of the participation of certain (visible) minority students, see DePalma (2007, 2008).

9 This was only positive and desirable in light of the Haven panel members’ preparation to both speak openly and to set limits for their own comfort.

10 According to Matusov, Bakhtin referred to himself as a philosopher, while others tend to consider him a literary critic, linguist, and philologist. Nevertheless, he also taught literature at the Pedagogical Institute in Saransk among other teaching positions (see Matusov [2004] for more details on Bakhtin as an educator).