Bucking the authoritative script of a mandated curriculum

Dialogic teaching represents an orientation toward classroom dialogue that surfaces student ideas, allows students to encounter and dialogue with each other's ideas, and privileges divergent understandings. This orientation shows considerable pedagogical promise. Yet, particularly in schools serving economically marginalized and/or linguistically diverse students, teachers are often obliged to use mandated reading curricula that emphasize knowledge transmission and single textual understandings - highly authoritative teaching that stands in contrast to dialogic teaching goals. In order to understand how teachers might pursue dialogic teaching within such a curricular context, we examine a second-grade bilingual teacher with strong commitment to dialogic teaching goals. We first analyze the mandated curriculum, finding that its recommendations for instruction were indeed mostly authoritative. By analyzing teacher interviews, however, we found that the teacher was able to teach toward dialogic goals by using the mandated materials with his students in ways that deviated from the curricular recommendations. Factors that may have supported this included his clear goal orientation and the tacit permission of his principal. This study provides an encouraging indication that student-centred dialogic teaching can exist in the context of a mandated curriculum that might appear at first glance to leave little room for dialogue among student voices.