Abstract
The biography of Luisa, a teacher participating in the dialogic pedagogical gatherings of Valencia, allows us to analyze those elements associated with these Dialogic Gatherings (DGs) that made it possible to radically transform Luisa’s feelings and thoughts, becoming a protagonist in the socio-educational movement in Valencia. This biographical study under a communicative approach shows how the gatherings led Luisa to initiate a process of transformation, not only becoming a happier and freer person, but also to dream of utopias of social creation. In this communicative biography, the key elements that enable teachers such as Luisa to become capable of leading educational movements based on validity claims, equality, and commitment to high quality education for all children are analyzed.
Keywords
Luisa is one of the 200-plus teachers who currently participate in the “On the Shoulders of Giants” dialogic pedagogical gatherings (DPGs) in the Valencian Community. The space emerged in 2011 with 20 people and now attracts 300 regular participants, including a range of educational actors. Luisa’s biography shows the radical transformation that she has undergone through her participation in these gatherings and can inspire that of others.
Dialogic teacher training is one of the programs that the Strategies for Inclusion and Social Cohesion From Education in Europe (INCLUD-ED) 1 project supported to address teacher training and educational systems that the European Parliament in 2006 determined were reproducing and even strengthening existing societal inequalities (European Commission, 2006, 2007). The DPG is a Successful Educational Action (SEA) that could break this trend by bringing scientific foundations and theories from the International Scientific Community (ISC) into teacher training to improve the educational outcomes and social cohesion in all schools and for all children.
The study we present here transcends Luisa’s biographical story and the impact that participating in dialogic teacher training has had in her personal and professional life to identify key elements that permit the construction of transformative intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) through teacher training. This article contributes to the challenge launched in the 1990s by P. McLaren (Giroux, 1988) regarding “to understand the complex interconnections among teaching, the construction of identity, the development of democratic social relations, and the challenge of social transformation” (p. 20). Through communicative biography, it is possible to detect interactions that have transformed the exclusionary 2 elements in Luisa’s life into socially created utopias (Aiello & Joanpere, 2014) with a positive impact on the Valencian socio-educational movement.
Dialogic Teacher Training: DPGs
Ramon spoke often with Pato about the creation of meaning in the dialogic gatherings, and in their conversations, that principle was extended to other educational, social bureaucratic or leveraged spaces where the key of their transformation was re-enchantment or the desire to find enchantment. (Giner, 2013, p. 98)
DPGs bring together teachers, families, and a range of educational agents to read theoretical source materials in pedagogy, sociology, psychology, and similar fields that are relevant at an international level, top research reports on education, and publications in high-profile magazines. Through the shared reading of such texts as The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Vigotsky, 1978), or The Culture of Education (Bruner, 1996), the participants gain access to the best scientific evidence in education at the service of the educational communities. Thus, dialogic gatherings (DGs) allow real access to information to achieve equitable educational improvement (Escudero, González, & Rodríguez, 2013)
DPGs “take us away from a traditional academic vision that distrusts every type of theoretical effort that could emerge in other training spheres that are not the university” (Giroux, 1988, p. 260). They become meaningful at the epicenter of critical pedagogy, which is to say, of education as a path that offers all children the possibility of achieving their greatest dreams and acquiring the necessary tools to succeed in their studies. Specifically, in the “On the Shoulders of Giants” DPG, we read to improve education in the Valencian Community, a region on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
These encounters, which take the Theory of Dialogic Learning (Aubert, García, & Racionero, 2009; Flecha, 2000) as a reference, are spaces for the dialogical creation of knowledge through egalitarian dialogue. “People continuously create and recreate meanings about reality, which are the result of intersubjective agreements arrived at through communicative processes” (Aubert, Flecha, García, Flecha, & Racionero, 2008, p. 77). In the DPGs, we compare the valuable and contrasting knowledge available in the scientific materials from the ISC with what we experience in schools and need; we do this through interaction based in communicative action (Habermas, 1984). The DPGs permit us to build bridges between popular pedagogy and theoretical pedagogy (Bruner, 1996) and to analyze and construct meanings regarding socio-educational realities. In so doing, the gatherings counter schools’ resistance to change that prevents them from taking a leadership role in the social transformations of the 21st century.
The seven principles of dialogic learning, namely, egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, instrumental dimension, transformation, solidarity, creation of meaning and equality of differences (Flecha, 2000), permeate the day-to-day work of the DPG. It is essential that these meetings assure a dialogue based on the validity of arguments, and not on the power position of each participant. Discussions should refer us to the shared theoretical and scientific texts and not to the experts’ view; in this sense, all of the cultural capital of the individual participants should be introduced in the shared interpretation of the readings, this leading to both high-level learning and educational and personal transformations (Pulido & Zepa, 2010). Luisa, whose biography is object of analysis in this article, is among a growing number of teachers with firsthand experience of this powerful process.
The Communicative Biography in Service of a More Fair, Solidarity-Based, Free, and Egalitarian Society
Our research practices are performative, pedagogical and political. Through our writing and our talk, we enact the worlds we study. (Denzin, 2006, p. 422)
“The interpretative biographical method consists of the study and collection of information from the life of a person through documents, stories, events and narratives that describe turning points in life” (Denzin, 2013, p. 66) or “epiphanies” (Denzin, 2014). This is what Luisa calls “the before and an after in her life.” The biographical method establishes connections with family and social history and assures the truth of the story as it interacts with other perspectives (Denzin, 2013, 2014). This case presents a communicative analysis combining data obtained from an in-depth interview, a discussion group, a questionnaire, and some writings by the research subject.
The study incorporates the principles of communicative methodology (CM; J. Gómez, 2015) to develop a communicative biography that makes it possible to draw generalized conclusions (Moore, 2013) and develop knowledge about the social phenomena being observed. The objective is to write texts that help us to move people to ethical action, imagining new forms of human transformation and emancipation in which dialogue is the main protagonist (Denzin, 2014; A. Gómez, 2014). As communicative researchers, beyond simply ascribing meanings, we build them intersubjectively with the people we study (J. Gómez, Latorre, Flecha, & Sánchez, 2006).
To obtain social utility while maintaining scientific quality through communicative biography, we must come as close as possible to the ideal of egalitarian dialogue between the research subject and the researcher throughout the entire process. This rigorous approach assures the validity of the arguments that are reached through consensus with the researcher while they are contrasted with the contributions of the ISC. For this reason, the information drawn from the applied data collection techniques was shared with Luisa during a second interview that outlined the results of the study. This “ideal egalitarian dialogue” is solidified by the extent to which we applied the principles of CM (such as understanding people as transformative agents and common sense) in the interactions with her (J. Gómez et al., 2006), thus getting closer to dialogic action (Freire, 1970). By combining scientific knowledge and Luisa’s insights from her cultural intelligence, we build explanations that help us rationalize the ideas and theoretical assumptions that supported her transformation through the DPGs while we develop a communicative story that helps us experience this impact in everyday situations. The purpose is to create “dialogic knowledge” (J. Gómez et al., 2006) about the transformation processes experienced so that to uncover ways to improve our world while this process may even include improving the individual protagonists of such biographies (García-Yeste, 2014). This happened to Luisa. She knows that “the heart learns that stories are the truths that won’t keep still” (Pelias, 2004, p. 171), and she described her experience of the communicative biography as transformative of her present and future: I conclude this work with greater enthusiasm, empowerment and clarity and at the same time, with strategies and solid arguments about my life that will serve me in designing a future that is different from the one I projected scarcely a year ago.
Luisa’s biography gains power from the solidarity that characterizes studies with a communicative focus. In other words, the dialogues that are established in the study are pursued to make other women aware of contributions that will help them live lives that are more just, solidarity-based, free, and egalitarian. This is possible if the study activates the final principle of dialogic learning, the equality of differences (Flecha, 1999), and frees the researching mind of social prejudices in the interest of fundamental values that unite humanity. Therefore, Luisa’s story explains the DPG-related processes of change that make social improvements possible without fear of being judged by the researcher or pretending to renounce her identity.
Luisa: The DPG as a Turning Point
Luisa and I met 14 years ago at the beginning of our teaching careers. In those years, we were united by our belief in creating a better world through education and the shared consciousness about the scant value of many of the classes that the university offered to us. This inspired us to seek guidance for our motivations at other training spaces and in social participation. Soon, our interactions were limited by a traumatic traffic accident that took me away from the university and from Luisa’s life for a long time. Ten years later, our vocation as teachers reunited us, and we resumed a relationship that has improved our lives and hopefully those of many children. Since 2007, Luisa has been a teacher of elementary education and therapeutic pedagogy.
Researcher (R): How do you connect the impact that the DPGs have had to the story of your life?
(L): . . . It has to do with the conception I have had for a long time about myself, that I wasn’t able to do it . . . I had become a teacher and that was all, because nobody really expects it of you. It has to do with my family history, a family with very few resources, without academic training. So the fact that I got to be a teacher is a lot, keeping in mind where my family started out in their day. So . . . the fact that no one has had high expectations from you . . . that’s why I feel so connected with all we learn in the GPD!.
Luisa is a participatory and responsible person who maintains good relationships with her coworkers. This is reflected in her work and in her partners in educational projects at the Miguel Hernández School. The school serves middle-class families and has approximately 500 students.
Luisa discovered the “On the Shoulders of Giants” DPG through her friend Clara, a teaching participant in the gathering. Luisa recognizes that although she was full of hope when she completed her studies, she had not encountered training spaces that contributed to a genuine critical pedagogy.
(R): The DPG has been a “before and after” in your life, you said in the discussion group . . .
(L): Yes, a turning point.
(R): Have you thought about why? Why do you feel it is so?
(L): There are many things that I have seen in my profession that I haven’t liked, but I did not know or have the strategies to change them . . . Then, I arrived at the DPG, and the impact was big. I don’t know how to describe the arrival: As though you open a world of possibilities and things begin to happen. Since then, it has been non-stop.
She identified the DPG as a critical space through which she could improve education and the teaching profession, but she did not expect the experience to have the transformational effect that it has had:
(L): It’s a hurricane that has gone around me completely, that has touched all of the areas of my life.
(R): What did you encounter in the DPGs that you had not encountered in other training spaces?
(L): The level of readings we shared . . . it’s that they open a door in your conscience. . . . What I didn’t know is that it was going to transform me at such a personal level. I did not expect that. . . . I have more freedom since my passage through the DPG, and this makes me very happy. There, you discover how communicative interactions change lives . . . Now I know that this is so.
The DPG permitted Luisa and the other teachers to become “radical” people in the sense that Paulo Freire defined as critical, loving, humble, and communicative (Freire, 1976). Currently, Luisa is not driven by her fears and insecurities; in her personal interactions, she listens for information that will help her improve the education she offers to boys and girls while building solid friendships and social connections that will help her improve the environments in which she participates. She has gone from being a bystander to being a participant; from reproducing to leading.
The Transformative Impact of the DPG on the Miguel Hernández School
Luisa, along with other teachers, leads the change in education at her school that was made possible by what she learned and experienced in the DPG. She describes how she wanted to reproduce the powerful results that other schools had experienced and that were improving education in the broadest sense she had ever known in terms of both educational outcomes and social cohesion.
(L): The type of argumentation that we used in the DPG, the way in which it was organized along the seven principles of dialogic learning and the commitment to the search for results make it very easy to transfer our learning at DPG to our school.
When she decided to start a gathering with the families of the school, she commented, “(L): I was bringing the ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’ DPG to the school.”
The immediate results empowered her by showing that her efforts had visible effects on the mothers who joined the dialogic literary gatherings. Reading books such as The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca or The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck together affected the sons and daughters of the participant women in terms of the increased speed with which those students learned to read or the enthusiasm with which they attended to school.
(L): Such profound transformations were produced that this year, some of these mothers have joined the “On the Shoulders of Giants” DPG and are reading The Culture of Education by J. Bruner.
(R): By means of teacher training such as this, will we be able to produce professionals who are capable of turning schools into places of transformation and possibility, along the lines of the pedagogy of Freire?
(L): One of the first ideas that I brought from the DPG and repeated over and over was “change the language of complaint to that of possibility”
Luisa highlights how the DPGs’ teachings about which SEAs produce the best outcomes in educational environments and why have led to significant changes in the school where she works. For example, the segregation of students with the greatest learning difficulties has been replaced with inclusive models based on the INCLUD-ED project (Flecha, 2006-2011). This change has meant that some students have been re-engaged in the standard curricular program, and their grades have improved within a year. Another key to the transferability of insights gained from the DPG to the classroom is the solidarity established among the DPG’s members:
(R): Sometimes, as Bruner explains, the popular pedagogy that we accumulate puts up barriers against change . . .
(L): The DPG provides you with all of that . . . It removes the barriers . . . because when you don’t know where to start something, you now have someone [from the DPG] to facilitate it; or between all of us, we think of what steps to take to move forward, and immediately you get rid of . . . the excuses stop because now you have it, this bridge.
In the case of Luisa, one of the difficulties that her school encountered in its attempts to improve education was a school-based protest against the educational administration for a lack of attention and resources. What helped Luisa make decisions without losing sight of her work objective as a result of ideological interests was the arguments and security with which the DPG empowered her. What began as an ethical struggle and a commitment to the lives of the students ended up devolving into a movement of tension, distrust, and charismatic leadership in the service of the personal interests of a few. These circumstances prompted people such as Luisa to leave the movement, which had sparked an enthusiasm and enchantment that initially had advanced the educational mission of the school. For Luisa, the decision to abandon a platform supported by the majority of school families was difficult; doing so placed both her personal concerns and her perspective of the children’s future in the balance as she saw the decline of an educational movement in Valencia that for the first time had freed itself from partisan, political interests. Luisa continues to meet with some of the teachers at the school who were helping to redirect the educational reform efforts that they initiated and which currently are becoming reality.
Personal Transformation and Professional Consistency
Luisa emphasizes that the intersubjective interactions established in the DPGs, based on theoretical discourses from Vigotsky (1978), Freire (1997), Bruner (1996), and Habermas (1984) among others, move toward the subjective; the dialogues shared in the group are internalized by the individual participants with the ability to produce personal transformations that necessarily affect professional teaching practices.
(L): In the gathering, while you are producing transformation that affects the professional, the act of being there and interacting with the other people means that you begin to change yourself. You encounter a space that helps you combine both discourses (the professional and the personal).
(R): In the book Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals by Giroux, he speaks of the teacher as searching for that consistency, that participation, that transformation . . . but as something very individual. In the DPG, we encountered these friendships, collectivity . . . which is what makes up what we have discussed, right?
(L): Yes, in the DPG, had there not been a collective creation of educational meaning, it would have been impossible to imagine myself overcoming all of the obstacles that you encounter in your day-to-day life or achieving the personal transformations that I have faced. Because even when you don’t imagine it because of low self-esteem, other people do.
Giroux (1988) proposed that teachers should become transformative intellectuals, “mediators, legitimizers and producers of social practices” (p. 201). The DPG makes it possible thanks to solidarity from others. The key to the DPG’s impact on our professional roles lies in living the seven principles of dialogical learning in collectivity, constructing practice in concert with the best international sources of educational science.
(L): I have seen classrooms led by teachers who knew and defended actions that could improve their students’ education and instead ended up worsening class outcomes through inconsistency in their educational practice. The DPGs help you very much with this if you want it.
For Luisa, the seven principles of dialogic learning have become a set of commandments that guides her life and professional labor.
Recovering the “Brightness” in Your Personal Affective Life
Luisa met Pablo, her partner, as she finished her university studies. They soon began to live together, and she devoted herself fully to the relationship. As the years passed, it became apparent that they were barely friends anymore and that their love lost its passion day by day. In accord with their social environment, she dismissed every issue as part of growing older, and by the time she noticed that she had done so, she had given up on everything except for her job.
(L): There had been at least one year of arriving every day at the house and hearing complaints, of him not speaking to me because I had arrived a bit late, and heated discussions almost daily, some of them very rough. I saw everything clearly when I began to take charge and have more self-assuredness and enthusiasm at work, and Pablo could not deal with it.
One of the DPGs that had the greatest impact on Luisa came from the book Radical Love (J. Gómez, 2015). Luisa had been unhappy for at least a year, largely because egalitarian dialogue with your partner, one of the keys mentioned in the book and one that we work through in every DPG, had disappeared from her relationship.
(L): I was beginning to read that this didn’t have to be, that passion could continue to exist, then it clearly changes your way of thinking and you say . . . How? And this is what I have here? And so at first you start with what you have, until you say, NO, there are a lot of converging factors here . . .
(R): Yes, and the key to the egalitarian relationship, right?
(L): Yes, the egalitarian relationship would have no reason to exist at all . . . But at that moment, I grabbed on to that [idea] and went contentedly to the house, thinking about what kind of work the relationship needed . . . and another opportunity . . . and on leaving from there now I realized that no . . . that all that we had seen in the explanations in the book, there was nothing, and I continued without being able . . . I still lacked strength.
The scientific readings, and the multiple dialogues about how to guide students toward positive sexual-affective socialization through egalitarian, caring, and passionate relationships, provided Luisa with arguments to end a relationship based on selfishness, fear, and coercion and that had become devoid of passion and motivation. Thus, in allusion to the words of J. L. Austin (1962) that the first step in taking real action is to formulate it, Luisa began to visualize the change, saying it aloud and then turning to face a resolution that was years late in coming.
Luisa recognizes that she was conscious of the suffering she experienced in this relationship and that it would not be possible to go forward without the solidarity and consistency that she encountered in the DPG space. The profound friendships that she made as a result of sharing a space where egalitarian and solidarity-based relations prevailed bring a dimension of meaning and consistency to everything she reads for the good of the school and necessarily call for her to transform her life and continue to move forward with the other participants. Today, Luisa finds her friends in the spaces of profound dialogue and in solidarity with women who will accompany her on the adventure of building relationships that are based on egalitarian treatment and are full of an enthusiasm that makes her “shine.”
A Transforming Impact on Her Choice of Friendships
Until she began participating in the DPG, Luisa had a group of friends from work; for various reasons, she did not find the support she needed to overcome her difficulties with this group. In the DPG of approximately 100 people, she created some solid bonds. She discovered friendships built over time that incorporated the dialogical principles of the DPG, such as solidarity, egalitarian dialogue, and transformation. Given that she had experienced the opposite in her life, Luisa especially valued the egalitarian relationships established in the DPG and how they facilitated closeness between people. In all, her experience with the DPG permitted her to radically alter the criteria on which she had based her selection of friends, and come to dedicate her time and attention to people who valued equality, freedom, and solidarity.
In the intersubjective dialogue that emerged during our interview, Luisa and I noticed that our egalitarian dialogues occurred not just in the spaces of DPG, but in our workplaces and informal spaces; the dialogues in the DPG were noticeably transforming all most of the spaces of our lives, including interactions with students.
(R): What are the things you do not want in your relationships now and how is that going to benefit the girls and boys?
(L): It gives you much more strength when talking to them and trying to teach them what it is that they should not tolerate from anyone, such as treating you badly, from where someone does not verbally treat you well up to your right to make choices about your own life. If you are saying this to them, but then again, we return to the theme of consistency, and if your life is totally different, those are empty words and [the children] will learn the complete opposite.
A Life of Impact in the Valencian Socio-Educational Movement
(L): Now I feel capable of everything; there is no turning back after these years of participating in the DPG.
The biographical study of the DPG’s impact on Luisa’s life has permitted us to confirm the positive effects that the DPG has had on teacher training, fundamentally in terms of its impact on Luisa’s professional and personal life, which has in turn contributed to strengthen the Valencian educational context.
In the DPG, Luisa encountered theory and educational experience that helped her to make real what had seemed to be dreams. Her story shows how “interactions change lives,” as intersubjective dialogues based on the seven principles of dialogical learning were the key to achieving the personal and social transformations that are improving her life and those of many other people in the Valencian region.
Shared reading of internationally recognized theoretical and scientific references provides teachers with the strategies and powerful arguments needed to transform educational environments and raise expectations for the entire student body. The DPGs do not exclusively raise the intellectual levels of teachers; rather, the impact translates into eliminating the barriers to children’s learning.
The DPGs have brought Luisa closer to freedom and increased her awareness of the importance of our choices, desires, and egalitarian communicative interactions. In the arguments, solidarity and deep meaning of all that we learn in the DPG, she has encountered the self-assuredness that she needed to make her own choices and the knowledge that she, and not others, has the power to decide what she is capable of doing and what she is not. This is relevant to Luisa’s life, but it has a fuller meaning because of all of the girls and boys who now will have the opportunity to learn it.
This communicative biography shows how Luisa’s growth transformed into social actions that encompass broader contexts. Since leaving the type of relationship that she would hope any girl would avoid, she has joined other women in leading the “Sherezade Women’s group: Dialoging feminism” [“Grup de Dones Sherezade: dialogant el feminisme”], which, within the framework of dialogic feminism, works toward eradicating gender violence and building egalitarian relationships that permit women to live our greatest desires and dreams. Thus, Luisa is not just a leader of educational change in her school; she has also joined larger movements, such as the team of SEA trainers at the Valencian Ministry of Education, and coordinates a DPG in the northern part of the region.
Researching and Transforming
One key aspect of qualitative research is reflexivity (Broom, Kelly, & Philip, 2009), in which the ability to act generates an awareness of what is needed to take action. In communicative biographical analysis, we see such principle enacted and expanded, as we see how individuals give their lives consistency when they create biographies and interpret and change the conditions under which they lived (Denzin, 2014).
There is an urgent need to show how critical research and interpretative and qualitative practices can help to change the world in a positive way (Denzin, 2014). Therefore, the challenge that Luisa and the researcher faced was to convert this communicative biography into a “liberatory record” both for Luisa and for other people “in such a way as those others can extend their own imagined experience of being in the world through knowing the specific cases of others” (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 12; Gonick, Walsh, & Brown, 2011).
Luisa’s communicative biography suggests that this is possible if we include the following factors in the biographical focus: (a) intersubjective dialogue between researchers and research subjects regarding the ISC’s theoretical and scientific contributions in the field of analysis and the real world, (b) the search for social transformation among researchers and research subjects, and (c) and the research subjects’ active participation during the entire study process.
To conduct research via communicative biographies is to advance toward personal and social transformation. Including contributions such as those of Flecha (2000), J. Gómez (2015), and Denzin (2014) in the dialogue allows us to move toward the use of communicative biography and obtain a glimpse of the dream of a real scientific study (Chomsky, 2000).
This communicative biography allows us to identify key elements of teacher training that enable teaching transformation that has an educational and social impact. “Since we don’t know what is historically possible until it has been tried, how can educators begin to empower students to imagine a future in which hope becomes practical and where freedom can be dreamed?” (Giroux, 1988, p. 13). Stories such as Luisa’s help us to advance in this direction.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.