Democracy, voice and dialogic pedagogy: the struggle to be heard and heeded

Dialogic pedagogy is widely viewed as an excellent means of educating students for civic participation in deliberative democracy. While many intervention-based studies have researched dialogic teaching and learning, we know very little about the enactment of dialogic and related ideas ‘in the wild,’ in regular classrooms. This paper contributes to the naturalistic study of dialogic pedagogy through close examination of an episode of sustained student engagement with, and argumentation about, a controversial social issue in an Israeli primary school classroom. In particular, we focus on the emergence and interaction of voices, defined as (1) opportunity to speak, (2) expressing one's own ideas, (3) on one's own terms and (4) being heeded by others. While the norm in Israeli classrooms is exuberant, voiceless participation, in the rare classroom episode examined here, we find students–and their teacher–engaged in heated, multivocal deliberation. We follow the struggles of marginalized students to be heard and heeded, exploring the conditions which ultimately allow for the actualization of student voice, and the accompanying pedagogical challenges and dilemmas.