Fecho: Teaching for the Students

Bob Fecho is a professor at the University of Georgia's department of language and literacy education. The book provides a framework for creating a classroom built on dialogue, inquiry, and critique.  He addresses concerns that education students bring to class. While I am an 8th grade English teacher, teaching full time, I am also a teacher educator and know that I am in a unique position to not only inform but shape teacher practice.

It is interesting to note that Fecho acknowledge Bakhtin's work as the "backbone of this book" given that my current dissertation committee has found problems with my use of Bakhtin as a framework for   my argument to teach novels in this age of Common Core's movement toward informational texts.

Chapter Notes

Fecho 

 12 the intent of dialogue rather than to destroy is to create without creation there can be no dialogue

The purpose of the chapter case to emphasize the importance of Generative lesson. It is done and service of gaining confidence to develop their understanding of future Texts and genres  they encounter

Ch 2
P22--What made this teaching critical for me was the overt focus and tacit implication that we live in a political society and that all social institutions including schools are driven by powerful political forces

24---Don't drive ideas into the ground where they won't be turned over examined and perhaps be considered--Instead post questions Perdenalas alternatives engage in dialogue and provide tools which current and future dialog could be achieved

Ch.3
Transaction--When we read we are encountering the text and ways for which only our experiences can prepare us; There are no generic readers or generic interpretations that only innumerable relationships between readers  and texts -29

My experiences don't preclude me from imagining or engaging in dialogue in order to gain insight into other perspectives but they do color, inhibit, enable, spin,  or somehow shape my eventual understandings

31 My job to teach students how to read and respond to those and other text... Helping students develop skills for unpacking text and using writing as a means for doing so. Much more motivational weight

... Works as complex investigations of the human condition and wanted my students to have the opportunity to save those texts in order to have the text shape them

33--I seek yo create wobble in the dialogic classroom. - To get students to notice and consider their beliefs and the worlds they inhabit 

Ch 4-- tension , squeeze and release 
41-I believe it's not tension  itself that represents a concern but how we respond to end-use tension that causes complications in our lives... The point isn't necessarily to remove tension to gain insight into the tension and have that insight support your efforts 43

Ch 5 difficulty

Ch 6 wobble 
Wobble US on the shoulder and induces us to ask why it nudges us toward action it suggests we get out at our chair and do something

54- The intention of the course is not to develop a consensus of understanding but to create an atmosphere and which wobble takes place

56- The paradox that a class where it is safe to investigate complex ideas sometimes feels risky and unsafe to the participants

Make it safe to experience such uncertainty

ch 7  
p. 69 -- to be a dialogic teacher is to question the engagement that occurs in your classroom; if you are unhappy with the current state of that engagement -- it it seems that too many students are merely occupying  seats and waiting out time -- then you need to admit to yourself ..it's you

ch 8
p. 75 -- by not realizing the importance of changing contexts, we tend to position our learning experiences in narrow ruts of understanding.  Our sense making can go only so far because we have fenced it in. 

ch 9 
p. 81 - Is it just about going from not knowing to knowing, as if we all cared about the same ideas, learned a the same pace, and prioritized what we learned in the same ways...Shouldn't our intent as educators be to understand the make-up of these varied contexts and what powerful potential they bring to our learning? Isn't it important for us to have insight into the diversity  among and within individuals  and how that rich mix contributes to learning in different ways? 


p. 83 -- Love...is an act of courage and unless we enter classrooms with love, humility, and faith in the power of humans to create and recreate, we will fail in our attempts to dialogue.

Of course, from Peter Elbow I know that part of grading student writing is that you have to choose to "like" it, and I have been known to use the word "love" with my students as in "I do this because I love you." There are times, however, that I get stuck in this "I have the answer" routine and feel like the class is against me only too late realizing that I failed at the love and humility and the faith in my students to dialogue with me on a topic. Such moments eat away at me until I see them again and ask for a redo or just try harder to love, possess humility, and have faith in them. 

ch 10
questioning

ch 11
constructing a simultaneously  unified and diverse self...p. 96 "Who we are becoming depends on where we are, how we have constructed ourselves to date, and to what extent we remain in dialogue with our contexts and diverse identities."

p. 101 -- "But if we who educate can grasp  that all of us are entered into a complex mesh of dialogical transactions with our selves and our many contexts, then we can also grasp that we teach for so much more than competency on a test."

ch 12
seamlessness