Dialogue Education:
Walking the Tightrope Between the Ivory Towers of Learning
Reflections and Best Practices of a University Dialoguer
by Danielle Pécore-Ugorji
Program Analyst
Canadian Foodgrains Bank
Winnepeg, Manitoba
Last night, while most thought I was lecturing to a bored bunch of students, I was actually at a masquerade. And I didn’t even have to skip class to go! I simply had to give students a license to be subjects of their own learning.
My students blow me away on a regular basis. This class I’m teaching looks nothing like most of the classes I took in university. I do not think they are smarter, more motivated or advanced than students a decade or so ago; they don’t have access to more information than I did; and their instructors don’t know anymore than mine did. I think they are simply empowered to learn.
But it hasn’t been easy. The process has mirrored quite remarkably the subject matter that I am teaching: community development, a required third-year undergraduate course for a degree in International Development Studies. I have been on a steep learning curve. I thought I had a solid grasp of the principles and practices of Dialogue Education and practiced them on a regular basis in staff-related “trainings” and “workshops” and the regular work of my “day job”. Then in come the students with their pre-conceived notions about “professors” and “academia”, their angst about grades, and their desire to absorb “knowledge” not participate in creating it. And I start by getting to know them, their learning needs and the resources they bring with them. I share with them my learning needs and resources. Slowly they start to trust that we may actually meet those needs together… And I start by getting to know them, their learning needs and the resources they bring with them. I share with them my learning needs and resources. Slowly they start to trust that we may actually meet those needs together…
I think the only generalization I can make about the impact my approach to Dialogue Education has had on my students is that it has made them uncomfortable. I am not what they were expecting. The class is not what they were expecting. They’re uncomfortable. For some the discomfort lasts only seconds. Many more have to actively push past that discomfort, but go on to learn and have fun even beyond my high expectations. Others don’t; others remain uncomfortable and stumble through, continuously trying to fit what we are doing into their old comfortable boxes of “traditional learning”. I’ve come to accept this, to welcome it; I may even be on the verge of celebrating it. While I parade happily down the hall at our masquerade wearing a mask depicting developing country governments, I also throw in a power point presentation here, a short lecture there, a well-structure exam to sum up their learning. I try to achieve balance.
I am learning to walk the tightrope between academic requirements (real, imposed by the University administration, and imagined, largely by students) and learning. It has been a great disappointment to me that the former generally do not reinforce the latter, but I am learning to balance both sets of needs and expectations. The following is a mish-mash of things I have learned along the tightrope:
Demystify knowledge and learning
I have learned that despite my efforts to create a safe learning environment, the simple act of choosingdialogue education as my ‘teaching methodology’ in a university setting can make some students and instructors feel very unsafe. I have come to see this as a political choice. Affirming the subjectivity of knowledge and encouraging students to participate in challenging and creating knowledge leads them to question all of their academic learning to date. “What do you mean there is no right answer?” “What do you mean you can disagree with the instructor and sill be right? “What do you mean that the opinion of this poor person is as valid as this academic source?” This questioning, for many who take it a step further, soon turns itself into questioning the systemic injustice in our world. “Why should we impose this way of doing on others?” “Who are we to judge who is poor and who is not?” “Why should my food travel thousands of environment-damaging miles to my plate?” I am learning how far I can push students to question, how much I can encourage them to bring their own experiences and interpretations into the mix, and still ‘cover’ enough ‘material’ for them to hold on to new concrete knowledge and feel safe. I am also learning to enjoy the new sense of empowerment that the power to ask these questions breeds in my students. I am learning to welcome the challenges to my views and the questions of my ways of doing and create a learning environment where contradictions can coexist.
Taste what you teach
Some might say that I have it easy: the principles and practices of Dialogue Education mirror so closely the best practices of community development that this is not much of a leap. Talking about power relationships in the classroom, using the class as a microcosm for community power structures, leads naturally into talking about power structures in communities engaged in development activities. It is also not hard to mirror how to handle cultural differences when my groups of students have included Ugandans, Chinese, Namibians, South Africans, Japanese, Ukrainians, Aboriginal Canadians, Koreans, Sudanese, Bangladeshis, Kenyans, Filipinos, Nigerians and people of various mixed cultural heritage. Not only does this bring a level of concreteness and immediacy to our learning, but, as in any community setting, greatly enriches the quality of our dialogue. In short, don’t just teach, do. Visit and use the services of a cooperative while talking to the worker-owners about their experiences. Walk around an organic farm munching on veggies when talking about sustainable agriculture. Invite a formerly displaced person or harness the experience of a refugee-student when talking about power structures in communities affected by conflict. Don’t just teach the topic: see, breathe, hear, taste, laugh, cry the topic.
Integrate structured input into the course syllabus
Ideally, in my day-to-day work, I build the learning around the learners’ needs, corresponding with them ahead of time and building achievement-based objectives and learning tasks that respond to their expressed needs, priorities and interests. I have even managed to do this quite well from thousands of miles away. But it doesn’t work that way in a university course: my syllabus has to be designed weeks before the course starts, I don’t know who my students are until well into the semester, and standardized material needs to be ‘covered’. At first, I thought: no problem, I’ll put it all together before hand and then guide students through an LRNA and tasks to rework the syllabus in the first class. I naively thought that student would jump at the chance to rework my syllabus, adapting it to their learning needs. Not so. Not safe. So the second time around, I integrated more subtle and structured ways of adapting the syllabus to meet the students’ needs. Students are hesitant to throw out what a ‘professor’ has prepared; the power structures of the university have made it unsafe to do so. So I leave a third of the topics and readings undefined so students can choose what interests them most. And I stay flexible to changing parts of the syllabus throughout the course: dates of assignments can be changes, readings switched for ones identified by students, planned classes cancelled to be replaced by student-identified activities or a class on another topic. I still begin my LRNA on the first day of class, but it is really never complete; I sill correspond with students who finished my class last December.
Give students control of the class
I was teaching the same class for the second time before I actually decided to try this, at a colleague’s urging. I hesitated: 45 minutes of my 2.5 hours of learning time seemed like a lot. But one of my frustrations with the first time I taught this course was that some students still didn’t seem to understand why I was choosing to do things the way I was. They were experiencing Dialogue Education and heard my transparent explanations of what we were doing and why every step of the way, but they still wondered why? Well, of course, they need to learn by doing! A third of each class is now facilitated by a pair of students who focus on an “apply” piece. All of them have used Dialogue Education, although I have not made it an explicit requirement. And I must admit: they regularly come up with better ideas than I had; they engage students on the content of the course and readings in amazingly creative and fun ways. Hence the masquerade of development actors that were parading through my class last night. We did more learning on the characteristics and appropriate roles of various development actors by illustrating them on masks than any lecture or small group discussion ever could have elicited!
Give students decision-making power
Instructors (not unlike community development workers) are called upon to make so many decisions that would be best made collectively. When appropriate and valuable I allow students to make decisions: they design some of the marking keys for assignments, they decide how often we invite guests to the class, how often we hold the class outside the university, what format they use to hand in their assignments (written, oral, visual, or a combination thereof), they decide the themes to which we apply our conceptual learning… Other times, I consult students when making decisions that need to be made by me. And I make it clear when they are making the decision and when they are simply being consulted.
Put the marks where your mouth is
I soon learned that what is most important to students’ is what makes up their course grade. If I say I value different learning styles, then the marks I allocate to different components of the course have to reflect this. One exam is structured and written; one is an open question to be answered at home in the method of their choice (visually, orally, written text). One assignment is a standard essay, the other a media assignment for which they analyze and create their own magazine articles, TV commercials, poems, photographs, radio shows, songs, etc. To ensure students give their participation the attention and effort it deserves – and to optimize everyone’s learning – I felt I needed more than your standard 10% show-up-and-stay-awake-participation-mark. So I allocated a third of their mark to participation in recognition that this is where a significant proportion of their learning would occur. I design learning tasks in such a way that their products can be clearly assessed and alternate or combine who does that assessment: me, students themselves or the rest of the class. I’m trying to correlate marks to learning.
Ensure ongoing feedback
While I try to constantly go back to the objectives, revisit the learning needs, evaluate what’s happening and get students to assess their own learning, this is not enough. I have found that, given the reality of the power dynamics between instructors and students in a university setting, anonymous, out-of-class mechanisms for feedback (such as a group email account, or notes handed into the receptionist) are required. This is a safe space for those still questioning the appropriateness of dialogue to be heard and allows me to address frustrations, misinterpretations and confusion before they get in the way of learning.
So what has all this achieved? Students are learning – way more and way better than in other courses, judging from their course assessments – and I must manage to meet the academic requirements because the university keeps asking me back! While I am nowhere near achieving the perfect balance, I haven’t fallen off the rope yet.
