Toward a Practice of Polyphonic Dialogue in Multicultural Teacher Education

Abstract

As the instructor of a multicultural education course for preservice teachers, I have attempted to guide my students in critiquing and reconceptualizing the deficit view of students, particularly minority students, endemic to the American school system. Yet I am faced with a dilemma: Is the fact that I believe my own students have deficit views of their future students not itself a deficit view, similar to the one I am trying to challenge? How can I escape this model of the teacher fixing the deficits of students in my own teaching? Bakhtin provides a framework within which I as a university professor can avoid the deficit trap with regard to my own students. Using a self-study methodology, this article analyzes ways in which adopting a pedagogy based on Bakhtin’s (1986, pp. 292–293; 1999) notions of dialogism and polyphony has shifted my own and my students’ participation patterns and describes some of the challenges I face in the continuous process of reflection on and redesign of my own teaching practice. After identifying potential patterns of dialogicity and developing some strategies for promoting these, I present a case study illustrating how these dialogic teaching strategies provided a framework for exploring heteronormativity.