The Practice of Dialogue in Critical Pedagogy

This paper examines dialogue in the higher education classroom. Instigated by my teaching experiences and the paucity of empirical studies examining dialogue in the higher education classroom, I present a re-examination of data I collected in 1996 for an ethnographic study focusing on the experiences of the participants in an ethnic literature course. I return to this data in order to cast further insight into my own teaching. After discussing the findings of this study - speaking (or not) as a cultural practice and translating dialogue to democracy - I reflect on how these findings inform my own teaching practice as an untenured assistant professor.