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As graduates in higher education engage with multiple constituencies from around the world, having cultural competency skills is valuable. Intercultural competence enables people to initiate and sustain dialogues among their diverse colleagues and members of the globalized community. In this chapter, Barger examines the role of dialogue education in attaining intercultural competency in graduate courses. According to Vella, dialogue education values inquiry, integrity, and commitment to equity. People should treat others with respect and recognize their knowledge and experience within the community of learning. Dialogue education provides a safe and inclusive place for learners to voice their perspectives and opinions. This chapter utilizes a professor’s reflections with respect to teaching a graduate Intercultural Communication (IC) course in a private liberal-arts college. In the narrative, she discusses teaching and learning strategies to help adult learners understand the importance of intercultural competence and interactions in a multicultural and multilingual world. Barger also examines the integrative reflections of graduate students that took the IC course.

This chapter discusses a form of pedagogy of reflection suggested to be defined as the dialogical-reflective professional-development school (DRPDS) – a framework that develops and empowers students by engaging them in a process of continual improvement, responding to diverse situations, providing stimuli for learning, and giving anchors for mediation. The pedagogy of reflection relates to dialogue not only from a theoretical historical context but also by way of example – that is, it offers empowering dialogues within the traditional teacher-training framework. This chapter outlines the importance of the pedagogy of reflection in the multicultural educational space of the preservice education field in Israel, analyzing the first university PDS model. The pedagogy of reflection in the context of the educational dialogue of educators is outlined as a tool for student empowerment, achieved through a community of learners who dedicate space to the development of their whole personality within the profession, taking a moral stance toward the educational discourse, minimizing judgmentalism and prejudice, creating national/gender equality with the goal of examining the fundamental question of educational performance, and reinforcing their sense of organizational belonging within the system. In these contexts, the chapter is based on the elements of dialogical philosophy exemplified in the thought of Burbules, Nelson, Isaacs, Bohm, and Heckmann and the reflective basis of educational and organizational performance exemplified in the writings of van Manen. The chapter also presents two examples from a project in which teaching units based on dialogue and reflection were developed within a dialogic community that represents in its very being collective empowerment, the possibility of coping with problems that are too large for an individual to solve on his/her own, and an alternative to sealed and alienated organizations.

In a qualitative study, 50 pre-service teachers were partnered with 50 elementary students to write each other in dialogue journals responding to texts on public issues. Based upon our analysis of the journals, written reflections from pre-service teachers, and interviews with the elementary teachers in the project, three findings emerged: student motivation for reading and writing increased, both types of students gained perspective consciousness, and elementary teachers found meaningful ways to integrate social studies with language arts. These findings suggest multiple avenues for future research surrounding dialogue journals, student engagement with public issues texts, and teacher education.

A dialogic approach to Ontario, Canada policy development was utilized to collaboratively re-conceptualize provincial Special Education qualification courses for teachers. The stories, perspectives and lived experiences of teachers, principals, supervisory officers, parents, school board special services personnel, students, and the public were included as essential voices and information sources within policy development conversations. These narratives of experience revealed the forms of knowledge, skills, commitments, and ethical stance necessary for teachers to support students with diverse and unique learning needs today and in the future. The transformative nature of narrative dialogue to enlighten, deepen understanding, and alter perspectives was illuminated. The policy development processes used in this publicly shared educational initiative served as a model of democratic dialogue. The inclusive and dialogic methods employed to collectively re-conceptualize special education courses illustrate an innovative framework for developing policies governing the public good. This model of democratic dialogue holds considerable promise for the future of teacher education policy and practice.

In this essay, I explore the question of how best to leverage the benefits of dialogue for leadership education. The essay makes the case for studying the work of the ancient Greek historian Plutarch, who provides us with a unique kind of dialogue about leaders and leadership in his Lives. This text features biographical sketches of important leaders from the ancient Greek and Roman traditions that are intended by the author to be in conversation with one another. In this essay, I present a brief content analysis of two lives, Lycurgus of Sparta and Numa Pompilius of Rome, with the aim of clarifying the leadership themes contained therein and showing how students of leadership can benefit from the conversation between these two biographies facilitated by Plutarch. In general, Lives is a resource though which students can enter into a profitable dialogue about important historical examples, revealing truths about leadership that help students to grapple with vital questions.

This paper seeks to intertwine current literature in social studies education with practical suggestions for integrating dialogue and controversy into the practicing teacher’s classroom. The works of John Dewey (1926), Diana Hess (2004), and Walter Parker (2003) will serve as the foundation of this essay; placing an emphasis on their respective arguments advocating for the school as a place where students learn to develop the ability to participate in informed dialogue and understand the foundational elements of a functional democracy. The essay will place emphasis on the necessity for teachers who incorporate controversial social issues into their lessons through various forms of discourse. To that end, a foundational analysis of the benefits of integrating controversial issues into the social studies classroom will be provided and followed by a description of four practical lessons that have effectively fostered dialogue amongst students at the secondary level. The aim of the paper, ultimately, is to provide practicing social studies teachers at the middle and high school level with feasible lessons that are grounded in the theories and philosophies of the leading scholars in social studies education.

The book has generated a passionate dialogue-disagreement (mostly but not entirely) with the book. Dialogue-disagreement is based on challenges, disagreements and rebuttals between opponents, often belonging to different, even irreconcilable, paradigms. The goal of dialogue-disagreement is not so much to convince the opponent to change their mind but rather to critically examine and problematize the two involved paradigms: the authors’ and the reviewer’s. By taking the generated challenges and disagreements seriously, both irreconcilable paradigms can grow through their replies. Dialogue-disagreement gives the participants–opponents the gift of revealing their own paradigmatic blind spots, which are often invisible from within their paradigms. Dialogue-disagreement is exploratory and based on an agnostic relationship between frenemies, i.e. “friendly enemies.”

This is a critical book review essay of Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm (Cunningham, 2021).

The reviewer views Ian Cunningham’s Self Managed Learning educational paradigm as a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education, while the reviewer sees his/her Self-Education paradigm as entirely Democratic (and Dialogic). Elsewhere, the reviewer discussed and critically analyzed the Progressive Education paradigm, which generally involves channeling the student’s learning activism and subjectivity toward learning outcomes desired by an educator. It uses the educator’s manipulation of the student’s subjectivity to make them study what the educator wants them to study. In contrast, the paradigm of Democratic Education assumes that the educatee is the final authority of their own education. The educatee decides whether to study, when to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, where to study, for what purpose to study and so on. The educatee makes these decisions by themselves or with the help of other people at the educatee’s discretion and conditions. The reviewer charges that Ian’s Self Managed Learning paradigm is a hybrid of both paradigms, with the Progressive Education paradigm taking the lead and exploiting the Democratic Education paradigm.

The book presented a unique, innovative practice worth a critical analysis. The reviewer’s dialogue-disagreement with the book reveals a particular hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education which is common to some innovative self-directed learning.

This chapter will focus on the use of reflective dialogues (RDs) to explore pedagogical practice in higher education. RDs allow researchers and participants to reflect on observed phenomena together, engaging in collaborative reflection that may allow both the researcher and the researched to gain from the interaction, throwing into focus different aspects of practice and a different perspective on the situation, and blurring the boundaries of research and researched into a more reciprocal relationship. Drawing on research which investigated the relationship between critical pedagogical theory and practice with 10 self-identifying critical pedagogues across eight English universities, I will explore the benefits and tensions of using a reflective dialogue approach, and the impact this methodology can have on researchers and participants. This chapter will make a case for RDs as both a practice for educators and as a methodology and explore how to do it, supported by relevant methodological literature, as well as the benefits and challenges of using RDs in social research, concluding with a discussion on how RDs might be used in other contexts to aid professional learning and reflection.

Research reveals very little about how the supervision of social studies student teachers ought to be enacted. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Based on the broader arguments for the democratic purposes of social studies, the author argues for the development of the democratic capacities of teacher citizens by creating deliberative and dialogic spaces in social studies field-based teacher education.

Four conceptual dimensions of dialogic pedagogy in the supervision of social studies student teachers are explored: questioning, listening, negotiation, and self-critique.

Because supervision of student teachers is a pedagogical interaction, a pedagogy of social studies field-based teacher education must be grounded in dialogue and deliberation.