The challenge of inclusive dialogic teaching in public secondary school

 Chrysi Rapanta, Lisboa (Portugal)

 Mercè Garcia-Mila, Barcelona (Spain)

 Ana Remesal, Barcelona (Spain)

 Cláudia Gonçalves, Lisboa (Portugal)

https://doi.org/10.3916/C66-2021-02

Keywords

Dialogic teaching, inclusive education, secondary school, teaching practice, teaching professional development, dialogue

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.

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Fundref

This study was funded by the European Union Research and Innovation Action Program with Grant number 77045. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0066) and the support by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (RTI2018-097289-B-I00).

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Technical information

Received: 29-05-2020

Revised: 05-06-2020

Accepted: 03-07-2020

First Online: 15-11-2020

Publication date: 01-01-2021

Article revision time: 7 days | Average time revision issue 66: 16 days

Article acceptance time: 35 days | Average time of acceptance issue 66: 51 days

Preprint editing time: 172 days | Average editing time preprint issue 66: 193 days

Article editing time: 217 days | Average editing time issue 66: 238 days

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