Learning in Community

In chapter 2 of Dialogic Approaches to TESOL, Wong discusses the benefits and challenges that come with learning in a community. She begins by discussing the Socratic and Confuscian views on learning and connects them to our views and approaches to learning and teaching today. Socrates would use guiding questions to help his students “give birth” to ideas without simply telling them the answers. Confuscious focused on “learning to be human” and both he and Socrates believed that it is absolutely necessary that learning take place in a group, through more dialogic interactions. I absolutely agree with this because through my own personal experience, I have learned more through discussion and social interaction than through skill drills. Whether is be discussing a metaphor in a novel I read for and English class, or simply engaging in conversation in my L2, the lessons I’ve learned through those activities have had more of an impact.

I was already familiar with many of the topics discussed in this chapter through my education classes. I liked the example of using students’ funds of knowledge in the classroom. As teachers, we often forget to take stock of what knowledge students bring to the classroom already. Unfortunately, this can be exacerbated when the student is also learning English. It is easy to think that a student is struggling with a math problem because they have not yet learned long division, when the problem is actually that they do not understand the language. The chapter focused not only on that type of knowledge, but also on the types of knowledge that families possess that may be different. Children from working class families enter the classroom with different funds of knowledge than children from affluent families. One type of knowledge is not better than the other, but the way we approach these children can send a very different message. It is possible to make students feel that their home culture/background/knowledge/etc is not valued in the same way as that of other families and they may feel that to be considered “American” or a part of the group, they must deny their family and their background. To avoid this we can incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into classroom activities as they did in the book. By doing this students can see that their knowledge is useful and important and should be considered with pride rather than shame.

I was also familiar with reading and writing workshops both through personal experience and other classes. When I was in elementary school, my favorite part of the day was writing workshop. It was where I found my place among my classmates, as “the writer”. I would invent elaborate stories that included all of my classmates and we would go on outlandish adventures to outer space or sometimes just a friend’s house. Because I was in a dual language program, sometimes I would write in English but I would also write in Spanish. My favorite type of writing was by far the narrative, but we wrote many different kinds of papers. To me writing workshop was not only a creative outlet, but was also where I, as a rather shy child, found my voice. In the stories I wrote, the boy in class who was always picked on became a lawyer and was always bailing us out of jail or defending us in court when our shenanigans inevitably led to run ins with the law. That was my way of imagining and creating a fair end to what I was too shy to vocally label an unfair situation. My point through all this is that by giving students a creative outlet, whether it be reading books of their choosing or writing stories, they can find their voice in their L1 and L2, which can be especially important for students who because of societal power structures often feel stripped of their power and voice.