In the dialogical classroom, students use writing to explore who they are becoming and how they relate to the larger culture around them.
Dialogical writing combines academic and personal writing; allows writers to bring multiple voices to the work; Involves thought, reflection, and engagement across time and space; and creates opportunities for substantive and ongoing meaning making. How can we, as teachers, carve out space in our literacy classrooms for a more dialogical approach to writing?
Focusing on adolescent learners, Bob Fecho argues that teachers need to develop writing experiences that are reflective across time in order to foster even deeper explorations of subject matter, and he creates an ongoing conversation between classroom practice, theory, and research to show how each informs the others. Drawing on NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, this book illustrates the empowerment that can result from dialogical writing even as it examines the complications of implementing this approach in the classroom.
¿In this book, you will discover how to fashion a dialogical writing program that meets your and your students' needs. Fecho helps you get there by providing a window into the classrooms of middle and high school teachers who are engaged in a dialogue with their practices. You'll see how these teachers enact practice in different contexts, and you'll hear them explain the essentials of their teaching as they demonstrate how dialogical classrooms depend on context and are forever in a state of becoming. The dialogical classroom: often messy, complex, thoughtful, and inspired, but most of all, full of potential.

Bob Fecho is a professor in the Language and Literacy Education Department at the University of Georgia in Athens. To date, his work has focused on issues of language, identity, sociocultural perspectives, practitioner research, and dialogical pedagogy as they relate to adolescent literacy, particularly among marginalized populations. He has published articles in Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, and English Education, and is the recipient of both the Richard Meade and Alan C. Purves Awards given by the National Council of Teachers of English. One of his books, "Is This English?" Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom, tells of his experiences teaching across cultures in an urban school and was awarded the James N. Britton Award for teacher research from NCTE, along with receiving honorable mention for the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award given by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Another book, one focused on developing the stance of a dialogical teacher, will be published in 2011. When not visiting his daughters, Cori and Kami, and granddaughter Maeve, he and his partner Janette enjoy traveling, movies, and performing in a folk trio.