This book presents a framework for conceptualizing and enacting dialogic approaches to teaching literature and reading in your classroom. Dialogical approaches have often been used in secondary classrooms for teaching writing by incorporating students’ lives and experiences into the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum. But what might it look like to create reading moments that bring texts to life by allowing students to use their own identities and experiences as the foundation for thei...

A critical resource for pre-service and practicing teachers, this book addresses what happens when new teachers try to enact inquiry-based and dialogical pedagogy within standardized schools. Exploring the narratives from beginning ELA and humanities teachers when they encounter challenges and obstructions, this book explores moments of wobble—key events that called attention to practice in the context of inflexible schooling systems—that the teachers shared with their peers via an oral in...

This book invites readers to explore the complexity of becoming a teacher through the stories of two novice ELA teachers, Emelio and Rachel, over the course of their first two years. The authors’ detailed, empathetic, and ethnographic approach allows space for the teachers to reveal little-seen and often overlooked "wobble moments." These moments illuminate the complexity and nuances that confront, confound, and compel teachers to remain in dialogue with practice. Documenting the journeys ...