From "I am" to "we could be": creating dialogic learning communities in ESOL teacher education

As educators concerned with enacting a critical and humanizing pedagogy, we place emphasis on dialogue as a way to structure our classrooms as authentic sites of democracy, equality and community-building. This study combined a collaborative research partnership with ethnographic methods to investigate one learning community's efforts to develop and live out a critical and humanizing educational experience in an undergraduate English for Speakers of Other Languages teacher education course in the southeastern United States. Our findings suggest that the course was successful in creating a dialogic learning community where participants, both teachers and students, recognized one another as important knowledge producers. However, a more complex learning community was also revealed, one that struggled to name and examine some of its underlying tensions on occasions when structural and procedural elements of community-building and course work were left unaddressed. Implications of this study suggest that we teacher-learners cannot be selective in our dialogic efforts; we must recognize dialogue as a process of knowing and learning as it relates to both the content and the process of our work.