Dialogue Education:
 Potential Impact on Teaching and
Learning in Urban School Systems

by Christelle Estrada, PhD
Director of Professional Development
High School Support

During the last two months I have had the privilege of learning with educators from three urban districts in Utah by being the instructor for two graduate, hybrid on-line courses through National University in San Diego. These hybrid courses have been designed with two face-to-face meetings during the month with all other interactions structured on-line through threaded discussions, reflective writings on texts, films, and websites through the use of open-ended inquiry questions.  For both graduate courses the Principles and Practices of Dialogue Education have shaped each experience for all of us.

The following written reflection, however, will focus on the first course: Cultural Democracy: Global and Local Issues.  The two primary texts for this course were Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom.  Other texts that were recommended were Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and the Johari Window model for illuminating that which is hidden, in other words blind spots.  This model was created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in the 1950s as a disclosure/feedback model for developing self-awareness.  I also added two speeches from Robert Kennedy, the extemporaneous speech given on the night of King’s assassination, April 4, 1968 where Kennedy quotes Aeschylus and the formal speech given the following night in Cleveland: The Mindless Menace of Violence which was used in the recent Emilio Estevez movie, Bobby, and can also be viewed at www.livevideo.com as the most watched video clip and at You Tube-Bobby.

This reflective inquiry into my teaching and facilitation is influenced by a Zen perspective and framed by a simple question:

How do I create the conditions for transformative adult learning to deepen each educator’s capacity for praxis, that is, cycles of reflective action to benefit students?

To tell the story of our learning, I have identified two critical elements that characterize this learning community experience.

The first element is my stance as a facilitator which can be illuminated by the following two essentials:

First, I am an advocate for each learner and I tell them directly that this is the purpose of the design for all of our interactions.  I take this responsibility seriously; therefore, my facilitation is based on transparency of intention and explicitness about the processes we use.  This transparency is modeled by the way in which I listen to each learner and affirm the voice they bring to the learning community.  It is my anti-plop strategy as Vella might frame it.  To take seriously the words of the learner and to respond authentically is to communicate the intrinsic value of each learner because what they contribute impacts the learning of the group.  The One is indeed the Many. The second essential flows from the first. I believe in the capacity of each person to recognize future possibilities already present in our experience, but not yet actualized.  This waking-up to one’s own true nature as a lifelong learner can only happen when there is safety for the kind of risk-taking that challenges our usual ways of thinking and behaving.

Another way to frame this potential is from a Zen perspective.  To start their day in Salt Lake’s Kanzeon Zen Center, practitioners chant: “Vast is the robe of liberation, a formless field of benefaction.”  This morning chant is an expression of commitment to the Big Mind/Big Heart process that opens up the field of our experience to encompass all who are both different from us and ultimately the same: including and transcending both aspects of the world to become our unique and awakened selves.

From the perspective of emergent leadership and Otto Scharmer’s work with the Society of Organizational Learning and his newly formed Presencing Institute, we could say that the field of social interaction creates the possibility for that which is unseen to manifest.  This aspect of changing our usual ways of seeing, thinking, behaving, and speaking poses the greatest challenge for new learning to happen. In the foreword to Scharmer’s (2007) Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, Peter Senge writes about the high stakes nature of the kind of work many of us are doing across the world, from Salt Lake and Raleigh/Toronto (Global Learning Partners) to Helsinki (School of Economics) and Salzburg (host of 2006 International Whitehead Conference):

These habitual ways of thinking and acting become embedded over time in social structures we enact, but alternative social structures can also be created.  Achieving the changes needed means nothing less than “creating the world anew,” based on a radically different view…of our collective capacity to, as Martin Buber put it, “Listen to the course of being in the world…and bring it to reality as it desires.”

It is not only my own state of mind as a learner with others and intentional behavior as facilitator, but a second element that haopens up the space for co-creating that formless field of radical interdependence when individuals become a community.

This second critical element is using well-sequenced Inductive Learning Tasks in a way that ensures each learner accesses deeper layers of consciousness by using their past experiences to usher in the future.  Scharmer asserts that when we shift the structure of our attention from our usual way of seeing, we open up the space to see what we could not see previously. In other words we illuminate the blind spot or that which is hidden from us. It is using the Johari Window model to create a safe space to reconsider and re-invent how we think about ourselves that entices the future to emerge. 

What were the Inductive Learning Tasks that began to shift our attention and provide access to deeper levels of consciousness?  The following is one example that opened up the doors of mind, heart, and will:

1A.	Think of a time when you learned something from a student. What happened? What did you learn? How did this experience change you? Please write for a few minutes.
1B.	Turn to one other person and tell your story. After listening to each story, using a Venn Diagram, identify and record the common characteristics.
1C.	When we share out: Say your name and the name of the student, and a common characteristic.
1D.	When we listen to each other, listen for the common themes across all of our experiences. In the content debrief we will list those generative themes as a way to frame our work together.
1E.	In our process debrief, we will identify the implications for our teaching within our specific context.

Our first class together set the tone for exploring our own interior geography, but the last class created a concrete challenge spoken through the voices of English Learners from Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan, Peru, and Mexico. 

The student panel and our interactions with them happened at a Title One middle school where the majority of students receive free and reduced lunch and thus qualify for Federal aid because of the high poverty level.  The students were accompanied by their newcomer teacher and three other adults who were doing one-to-one tutoring with each of them.  At the end of our experience I provided a meta-cognitive prompt, once again shaped as an inductive learning task:

Listen to the following prompt. I will give you time to think or write. Then we will share out. The prompt is: Before I heard these students I thought… and Now I think….

Their responses were self-disclosing, real and shared with what Scharmer might characterize as accessing deeper layers of consciousness.  This happened by individuals:

suspending judgments about the students and seeing with fresh eyes, thus accessing the deep intelligence of Open Mind redirecting their attention to sensing what was really happening in this new field of social interaction, that is, listening to the experiences of refugee and immigrant students; and thus accessing the deep intelligence of Open Heart which always challenges the inner Voice of Cynicism, and letting go of who I usually think I am, connecting deeply to others, and activating the inner intelligence of Open Will, challenging the Voice of Fear with these two emergent questions: Who am I? What is my work?

So what has been the impact of our month long course together?  What is the potential for transformative praxis at a systems level?  I will let the voices of the participants speak for themselves.

A second grade teacher in a fairly affluent elementary school wrote:

It is not enough to know about injustice but I must be willing to act in response to that injustice. I must continue to learn from my students and be reflective in both my learning and teaching.

A high school social studies teacher in the same district wrote:

Teaching is an extraordinary journey and it is easy to become vulnerable to embracing the cynicisms of our society and wait for a “more convenient season” (King 1963) to become what Dr. King refers to as the extremists for the extension of justice.  As educators we increasingly experience the challenges facing our nation in our own classrooms and schools. We must not ignore this, but instead work towards creating more equitable educational experiences for everyone because the heart of our nation is in our educational system.

How will this deepened experience of Open Mind and Open Heart translate into intentional transformation within her own context?

The implication for my teaching is that I need to ask more questions about where they’ve come from, what they’ve learned, and what they need to know in order to meet their needs. I need to remember Freire’s exhortations about dialoguing in order to understand what people need so that they can control their own destinies.

A teacher from a neighboring district wrote:

The other type of violence that Kennedy discusses in his speech is the violence of institutions. He describes it as: “…indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. It is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.”

She continues her reflection that turns to questioning:

This is a new idea to me, that an institution can be violent. As I read how Kennedy defined this type of violence, I had to agree that it is real and still very much a part of our society today. It made me look at my own school and classroom, is it an institution of violence?  Do we use policies and procedures that damage the children and families whom we serve? I hope that we don’t, but it was a wake up call for me to revisit why things are done the way that they are and is it always best practice?

In reflecting on this experience I have identified two critical elements of Dialogue Education that have the potential for developing a common language for transformative adult learning within urban education. Both of these elements are based on:

explicit advocacy for the adult learner as co-learner careful design of a finely sequenced series of inductive learning tasks.  Both of these elements are based on the foundational proposition in Scharmer’s newly articulated Social Field Theory: “Social systems are enacted by their members and in turn shape their members’ actions and all enactment takes place in a context” (p. 233).  My assertion, emerging from my most recent experience, is that the conscious use of Dialogue Education has the potential to shift the structures of attention so that, to paraphrase Goethe: We know ourselves to the extent that we know the world; we become aware of ourselves only within the world and aware of the world only within ourselves.  It is in the conscious accessing of those deep intelligences of Open Mind, Open Heart, and Open Will that a new world will emerge, both within us and outside us.

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Notes:

Scharmer, C.O. 2007. Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, The social technology of presencing.  Cambridge, MA: Society of Organizational Learning.

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