The Importance of Dialogue for Justice and Learning: A Commentary on “Midadolescents’ Language Learning at School: Toward More Just and Scientifically Rigorous Practices in Research and Education”

Uccelli focuses readers’ attention on two language-based challenges for educational excellence and equity in today's adolescent classrooms. One challenge is the diversity of social identities, where students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds are often taught by teachers who do not share their cultural backgrounds or experiences. Her own university students reported that their teachers never showed interest in their experiences or languages and told them that the ways that they talked would hold them back. Some were sanctioned for enacting their bilingual identities at school. Students cannot realize their full potential in contexts where they encounter linguicism and racism and where their ways of talking are negatively judged and their meanings not heard.

The second challenge is that midadolescence is also a time when the linguistic demands of learning increase, with variation across subject areas in ways of participating in developing and critiquing knowledge. At the same time, teachers are currently seldom well prepared to be explicit about the ways language works to make meanings in their fields of study or to support students in development of reading, speaking, and writing in their disciplinary areas. Uccelli's research focuses on this challenge, identifying linguistic features of the discourses through which knowledge is presented and critiques are developed. My research, too, has focused on making this hidden curriculum (Christie, 1985) of expectations for language learning visible and explicit (Schleppegrell, 2004, 2020). But success with confronting this second challenge, as with other educational challenges, depends on overcoming linguicism and racism.

Language-in-education research that is grounded in a social semiotic perspective can contribute to overcoming linguicism and racism by recognizing that interpersonal relationships in the classroom are enacted simultaneously with engagement in knowledge construction. Languaging is the primary social process through which learning is achieved in school contexts, as knowledge is socially constructed (Halliday, 2007). Every utterance shapes classroom meaning-making by simultaneously construing interpersonal and ideational meanings as participants position themselves and others while sharing experience and knowledge. Those who speak in the classroom are always displaying aspects of their identities, so a tenor of mutual respect for differences and openness to listening for meaning are a prerequisite. Listeners who do not respect others’ language and respond in ways that reject or discount them and their language perpetuate injustice and inequity and hinder the learning of all (Flores & Rosa, 2015).

To elaborate on Uccelli's point, students are not just “potential contributors to later scholarly endeavors [emphasis added].” All students bring cultural and linguistic resources that enable them to contribute to building knowledge in interaction with others. Every student draws on a full repertoire of linguistic registers that they have developed in activities in and out of school. All registers can be welcomed in learning and participating because school knowledge has to be built with the language and from the experiences and knowledge students bring to the classroom.

As participants in the classroom discourse community work together to develop and critique new knowledge, learners do not just take on what is already known but actively develop understanding that is shaped by the context of learning (Halliday, 2007). Uccelli points out that students may have “gap[s] in collective interpretive resources”; this is true of both teachers and students. While students are learning new disciplinary practices and discourses and engaging with them critically, teachers may need to learn to listen to students and consider what they share, especially when what they share is presented in unfamiliar registers or from different epistemological perspectives. Teachers can adopt a stance that they are there not to provide learners with new resources or to identify what learners lack but to engage learners in interaction that empowers them to engage with and critique the dominant narratives that underlie school discourses. At the same time, with an understanding of language and learning as a dialogic process, teachers can learn to talk explicitly about language in ways that make the meanings and practices of the field of study more available to students.

We need more language-in-education research that sees the classroom as a discourse community where what is said by any speaker affects the positioning of others. Such research can contribute to preparing teachers to engage students whose social experiences and languages they do not share in productive dialogue and joint participation in knowledge construction (Harman, 2018). In teacher education, learning to do the interpersonal work of positioning students as knowers can interact with learning the pedagogical work of talking about language in meaningful ways that enable students to participate in and critique the knowledge presented in different subject areas (Mizell, 2021).

Positioning of students and knowledge is simultaneously achieved in dialogue, and how to create dialogue that engages all learners in adolescent classrooms across content areas in productive discourse remains an important focus for language-in-education research. It is in the context of making meaning in different subject areas that teachers and students can recognize the power of languaging in shaping the field of study as well as the classroom context (Monte-Sano et al., 2021). Both teachers and students need to talk about language and meaning in explicit ways, drawing attention to how speakers and writers position their interlocutors with every utterance/clause as well as how the language they use judges, values, and critiques people and ideas. In this way educational researchers can address the challenges Uccelli raises.