Teacher Reflection in Literacy Education– Borrowing from Bakhtin

Abstract

In this article, we introduce Bakhtin’s (1981) idea of revoicing and situate our data drawn from a graduate literacy methods course for in-service teachers in the United States in this framework. This study is exploratory in nature. We use data from a single literacy methods class to explore and shed light on the “how-to” of teacher reflection using a Bakhtinian framework. As teacher educators, we believe that introducing new frameworks and perspectives that enable professionals to dismantle the binary of theory and practice by putting reflection into action is of high priority for the field. We discuss in detail an activity in a literacy methods class that requires the in-service teachers to put the idea of culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994) into action by dramatizing a read-aloud in a childhood classroom, and to observe and analyze what happens when an idea from a class reading (culturally relevant teaching) takes a dimensional spin into practice (a dramatized classroom scenarios). In doing so, the in-service teachers were challenged to reinterpret and revoice the concept of “culturally relevant teaching” to meet the realities of their own classrooms and their own pedagogical tales (Dyson, 2002). The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on teacher reflection by shifting the focus from theorizing about teacher reflection to the enactment of teacher reflection.