Bob Fecho

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students' interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today's diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards.

Abstract: Foster a classroom community where teachers and students make their own meanings of the world and consider their relation to larger social, political, cultural, and historical issues. The reader will find a rich range of perspectives in these stories of K-12 teachers and university educators who participated in a three-year study to explore issues of critical inquiry. This text will show: The power of research partnerships; A framework for teachers and teacher educators that provides ongoing, mutual professional support; The ...

The bell rings. Some late arrivals scram-ble for the door, but at least one con-tinues his slow amble down the high school corridor. In a scurry of squeaks, the teacher finishes writing the title of To Kill a Mockingbird on the white board. Pointing to a pile of paperbacks on her desk, ...

This collaborative self-study took place in two universities in the United States. During the spring semester of 2005, Fecho worked on issues in literacy with middle school preservice teachers at the University of Georgia, a large research university in the Southeast. Lassonde, taught issues in literacy with elementary preservice teachers at SUNY College at Oneonta, a small teaching university in the Northeast. Fecho and Lassonde formed a research collaborative along with graduate students Mallozzi, Mazaros, and McLean. We ...

In this article we introduce tension as a means for qualitative data analysis based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory. We first explain the foundations of Bakhtin’s theory and show the inevitability of tension in our lives and qualitative data analysis. We then offer a review of how Bakhtin’s notion of tension has manifested itself in qualitative research, which prompts us to establish a tensional approach to qualitative data analysis. Finally, we outline our framework for a tensional approach to data analysis and illustrate examples of putting this approach into practice in our own study. Our tensional approach (1) explores key moments of tension; (2) seeks out unease and discomfort; (3) involves researcher and research participants in ongoing dialogue; (4) and embraces multiple perspectives on a range of tensions during the data analysis process. It encourages uncertainties and questions instead of pursuing certainty of meaning and fixed conclusions.