DIALOGIC TEACHING AND MULTILINGUAL

COUNTERPUBLICS

MARIA PAULA GHISO*, GERALD CAMPANO**, GRACE PLAYER** &

ALICIA RUSOJA**

* Teachers College, Columbia University, ** University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

This article explores what happened when we co-constructed language and literacy curricula with Lati-
na/o immigrant families and youth in two interrelated community-based educational classes as part of a
research partnership with a diverse Catholic Parish. We employ theories of publics/counterpublics to
characterize the participants’ racialized and criminalized experiences within the dominant public dis-
course on immigration, as well as their agency in resisting such framings. We argue that adopting an
inquiry stance into our practice, which situates teaching within larger sociopolitical contexts and power
dynamics and encourages self-reflexivity, was a necessary component for our dialogic pedagogy. Our
findings illustrate how participants mobilized their cultural resources for social critique through learning
experiences that reflected community concerns, and promoted civic engagement. We conclude by iden-
tifying four ways in which we were able to create the conditions for dialogic teaching that tapped into
participants’ multilingual counterpublics.

Keywords: counterpublic, identity, Latina/o immigrants, literacy, multilingualism

1
Ghiso M.P., Campano, G., Player, G. & Rusoja, A. (2016). Dialogic teaching and multilingual
counterpublics. Contribution to a special issue on International Perspectives on Dialogic The-
ory and Practice, edited by Sue Brindley, Mary Juzwik, and Alison Whitehurst. L1-Educational
Studies in Language and Literature, 16, p. 1-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-
2016.16.02.05
Corresponding author: María Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University, Depart-
ment of Curriculum and Teaching. 525 W. 120th St., Box 31. New York, NY 10027; email:
mpg2134@columbia.edu
© 2016 International Association for Research in L1 Education.
2 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

One Saturday morning in the Fall 2012, Latina/o families, their young children, and
members of our university-based research team gathered for the first meeting of
what would become an intergenerational class around language learning and liter-
acy. The parents had immigrated to our Northeastern city from Mexico and were
involved in St. Frances Cabrini (all names are pseudonyms), a multilingual, multi-
ethnic Catholic Parish with which we have been cultivating a now-six year research
partnership. Parents had expressed a desire for classes where they could learn Eng-
lish and work together to support their children’s education. The families also
shared challenges they faced in navigating broader issues that were impacting their
lives, including xenophobic and anti-immigrant policies, monolingual ideologies,
labor exploitation, and the upheaval of the public school system in the city.
Our orientation to partnering is derived from frameworks that recognize and
seek to learn from the knowledge of linguistically minoritized and racialized com-
munities (Alcoff, 2006; Campano, 2007; Moya, 2002) and that value collaborative
inquiry and dialogic pedagogies (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Juzwik, Borsheim-
Black, Caughlan, & Heintz, 2013; Freire, 1970; Simon, Campano, Broderick, & Pan-
toja, 2012). Rather than “deliver” knowledge to the Latina/o parents and their chil-
dren as determined by the teacher’s goals, a monologic feature of many literacy
programs aimed at immigrant families (Tinkler, 2002; Whitehouse & Colvin, 2001),
we hoped to create a space for mutual learning/teaching that would be enriched
by multiple perspectives (Mohanty, 1997) and participatory approaches (Auerbach,
1989; Freire, 1970). Such a pedagogy views all participants in this space as “critical
cultural researchers and actors” (Freire, 1985, p.98) committed to “on-going en-
gagement in dialogue and a mutual answerability” (Renshaw, 2004, p.6).
Dialogic teaching is concerned with “help[ing] participants share and build
meaning collaboratively” (Lyle, 2008, pg. 225). During our first inquiry group ses-
sion, we asked families to reflect on what had worked well for them in previous
language learning contexts, what brought them to the group, and what goals they
envisioned for our time together. Families mentioned a range of aspirations that
emphasized both specific skills in English, such as verb conjugations and pronuncia-
tion, as well as communicative purposes such as “hablar con mi jefe [y] con la
maestra de mi hija” [talking with my boss or with my daughter’s teacher], “ir a las
citas del doctor” [going to medical appointments], or “buscar trabajos” [looking for
jobs]. At the end of class, Ángela, one of the moms, approached us to share several
concerns. She worked on alternate Saturdays, she told us, and would thus not be
able to come on a weekly basis. We also learned that she, like the other parents,
walked a half hour with her young children to get to the parish, even in inclement
weather and during the winter months. Ángela ended the conversation by telling
us that she hoped there wouldn’t be a focus on her life, as had been the case in
English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes she had attended in the
past. She wanted to learn English, she emphasized, not just discuss her experienc-
es.
Ángela’s caution about the relationship between teaching/learning and her per-
sonal narratives underscores important tenets of dialogic instruction. As Freire
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 3

(Freire & Macedo, 1995) emphasizes, dialogic teaching views dialogue not as a con-
fessional of one’s experience, which interprets individual narratives within a psy-
chological framework. As members of a minoritized community that is criminalized
as potential “illegals,” we speculate that course participants may be rightfully con-
cerned about how their narratives might position them as victims or, worse, could
even be used against them. Nor is dialogic teaching a mechanistic pedagogical
structure. Rather, dialogue is “an epistemological relationship” (p. 379) and “the
fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process of learning and know-
ing that invariably involves theorizing about the experiences shared in the dialogue
process” (p. 381). Our initial meeting reminded us of the importance of listening to
and valuing participants’ knowledge and experiences and their goals for the class
(Anderson, 2006), even when these ideas at times seemed in tension with our own
instructional stance (Aukerman, Belfatti & Santori, 2008). It would also go on to
inform other collaborative inquiries at St. Frances Cabrini, including participatory
research with Indonesian and Latino youth (among them Ángela’s son Pablo) who
researched topics they identified as salient to their lives. Throughout these pro-
jects, dialogic teaching both provided a window into and became a vehicle for the
inter-subjective process of conceptualizing issues that affect immigrant communi-
ties.

1. ARTICLE OVERVIEW

How do educators foster dialogic teaching when societal inequities may inhibit stu-
dents’ desires to share their perspectives and experiences? How can teachers cre-
ate the conditions for genuine dialogue when there are stark power asymmetries
both in the classroom and the larger context of participants’ lives? This article ex-
plores what happened when we co-constructed language and literacy curricula
with Latina/o immigrant families and youth in two interrelated community-based
educational classes, a family literacy/ESOL class and a youth Community Research-
ers Project, both held at St. Frances Cabrini parish and its social justice center. We
document how participants mobilized their cultural resources for social critique
through learning experiences that reflected community concerns. We also argue
that adopting an inquiry stance into our practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009),
which situates teaching within larger sociopolitical contexts and power dynamics
and encourages self-reflexivity, was a necessary component for such a dialogic
pedagogy.
In the first part of the paper, we employ theories of discursive pub-
lics/counterpublics to characterize the participants’ marginalization as racialized
and criminalized immigrants in the public sphere, as well as their agency in resisting
such framings. We then describe how we were able to dialogically structure the
classes to tap into multilingual counterpublics. From the family literacy/ESOL pro-
ject where Ángela was a participant, we analyze our practice of sharing “Class
News” as a means of collaborative inquiry and curriculum building around topics
such as immigration, educational advocacy, and health concerns. From the Com-
4 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

munity Researchers Project, we analyze Pablo’s (Ángela’s son) approach to concep-

tualizing and carrying out research on vandalism that drew on community dialogue
as a resource for learning about a nonfiction topic relevant to his life. We conclude
by identifying four ways in which we were able to create the conditions for dialogic
teaching that tapped into the intellectual resources of the community.

2. DIALOGISM AND COUNTERPUBLICS

Dialogic theory has a long intellectual genealogy that can be traced back to Socra-
tes and extends to modern thinkers such as Bahktin (1984) and Freire (1970), who
have had particular influence in the field of language and literacy education. Within
classroom contexts, dialogic teaching is concerned with redistributing intellectual
authority and creating learning opportunities that are not solely driven by the
teacher’s voice or agenda, but by the collision and refraction of multiple voices
(Aukerman, Belfatti & Santori, 2008; Bhaktin, 1984; Nystrand, 1997), which are
themselves historically shaped. A central consideration of dialogism is epistemic—it
“assumes knowledge is something people do together rather than an individual
possession” (Lyle, 2008, p. 225), and occurs collectively through the sharing of var-
ied perspectives and ideas by class participants.
The cultural and historical nature of dialogue (Bahktin, 1984) invariably raises
issues related to power and identity. The literature on counterpublics, we suggest,
complements dialogic theory in its particular attention to how minoritized commu-
nities are impacted by dominant framings of their experiences. It helps us under-
stand how what is voiced, and silent, in classroom discussions is shaped by larger
social dynamics, prompting questions such as the following: Who is and who is not
included in a particular dialogue and why? What other dialogues may be occurring
around issues of equity and social justice to which educators may not be privy?
What is the potential role of subordinated languages, knowledges, and perspec-
tives in a dialogue? How does a dialogue change across multiple public spheres?
Habermas’ (1991) foundational conceptualization of a public sphere where citi-
zens engage in decision making through reasoned and dispassionate argumenta-
tion laid the groundwork to further investigate both the limits and possibilities of
such deliberative democracy under conditions of power asymmetry and structural
inequities. Some scholars, such as the feminist philosopher Young (2000), have
challenged Habermas to think more expansively about what constitutes reasoned
dialogue to include rhetorical and disruptive acts, such as street protests, which
may reflect forms of communication arising from marginalized social locations.
Others have suggested the ideal of a unitary and inclusive public sphere to be
premature and utopian (e.g. Benhabib, 1996). How can, for example, individuals
with undocumented immigration status engage safely and deliberatively about
issues regarding their children’s education and future aspirations if doing so may
put them in risk of detention or deportation? The move to pluralize the public
sphere to encompass multiple publics has been one way to account for the inter-
sectional social issues that divide people and stymie dialogue across boundaries of
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 5

class, language, gender, race, (dis)ability, and citizenship status. Spanish language
television, for example, with its own variety shows, news programs, and commer-
cials for Latin American products, may be thought to speak to one public among
many within U.S. conceptions of pluralism.
The degree to which various linguistic publics also map on to the experiences of
racialized and minoritized identities raises the importance of affixing the term
counter to publics, and to investigate the cultural and political work of what Fraser
(1997) has termed subaltern counterpublics, the “parallel discursive arenas where
members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses,
which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identi-
ties, interests, and needs” (p. 81). Counterpublics are not merely political in a nar-
row sense, but also reflect countercultures and alternative ways of being in the
world not explicitly directed toward a concrete, shared political cause (Warner,
20012). Asen’s helpful (2000) review of counterpublic theory argues that its focus
should indeed be on “alternative discourse norms and practices,” rather than at-
tached solely to specific persons, topics, or places (p. 424). These discourses both
“disclose(s) relations of power” while revealing how “participants in the public
sphere still engage in potentially emancipatory affirmative practice with the hope
that power may be reconfigured” (p. 425). Dialogic learning spaces that incorporate
the counterpublic can help reconfigure power dynamics by providing openings for
immigrant families and youth to make visible the struggles they face as well as their
collective agency in working towards change.

3. LATINOS AND IMMIGRATION: DISCURSIVE (COUNTER)PUBLICS

Latina/o immigrant youth and families have been subject to a deficit orientation in
public discourse (Buff, 2008; De Genova, 2004, 2005; Perea, 1997), particularly
post-9/11, through dehumanizing language that interpellates them as having crimi-
nalized identities. Our local city newspaper, for example, frequently blasts head-
lines about “illegals.” A recent article states:
Those ‘without documents’ resent being called ‘illegals,’ but that's what they are…we
do not welcome…people who disrespect our laws, sneak across our borders or over-
stay their visas. They are lawbreakers [Artifact excerpt, August 2014]

In the brief 600 word article, the law and illegality are referenced directly 22 times,
16 through mentions of “(il)legal,” 2 “felons,” 3 “criminal/crimes,” 1 “arrest,” and
several other construction that denote illegality, such as “break in through a side
window” or “sneaking” across the border. A local community organization that ad-
vocates for immigrant rights is labeled an “illegal immigrant enabler.”
These characterizations of individuals with undocumented immigration status
are prevalent in the public sphere. Scholars have argued that such positionings are
tied to histories of racism and nativism (Huber, 2009), including the colonization of
Mexico by the United States (Castro-Salazar & Bagley, 2010). Framings of the immi-
gration debate target Latina/o communities with undocumented status (Chávez,
6 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

2008), circumscribing participation and belonging along demarcations of “nation-

hood” that are historically contingent and racialized. For example, in times of eco-
nomic growth, the US has instituted programs to encourage border crossings in
order to supply a cheap labor force, and many of the conditions that have resulted
in current migration patterns were created through U.S. policies (Castro-Salazar &
Bagley, 2010). The dominant public discourse of Latina/o immigration elides these
histories and their links to racism and language ideology.
There are also alternative discourses around immigration taking place (e.g.
Mangual Figueroa, 2012). At the multilingual Catholic parish that is the site of our
research partnership, advocating for immigrants is part of “protecting human digni-
ty” [Interview excerpt, Sister Ana, 2012]. In a letter to parishioners printed in the
weekly multilingual church bulletin, for example, the Msgr. invites all members of
the faith community to dialogue about this issue:
[H]ear what other parishes through the U.S.A. are doing on behalf of the “undocu-
mented.” Our “undocumented” will be able to derive a bit of encouragement…and our
“documented” (as in able to VOTE!) will learn ways that they might better live and re-
flect our Church’s Social Teachings. Please come!

The Msgr. frames immigrant rights as a cause not only relevant to those vulnerable
to deportations, but to the whole parish community. Through the use of quotation
marks, his message makes visible the constructed nature of divisive language (“un-
documented” & “documented”), and qualifiers like “our” promote a sense of inclu-
sion and shared humanity.
Msgr. invokes a discourse that links parishes “throughout the USA” and diverse
people (individuals with and without papers) who should all participate in a coun-
terpublic dialogue around immigration.

3.1 Language, Culture, and Nationhood

Educational curricula for immigrants are too often governed by assimilationist ideo-
logies that do not take into account the rich linguistic, cultural, and epistemic re-
sources of students’ multlingual counterpublics. For example, many ESOL classes
encourage participants to downplay their language(s) and culture(s) in order to
“belong” (Rivera & Lavan, 2012; Valdés, 1996), despite the fact that, because of
racism and nativism, no amount of English learning may overcome their status as
perpetual foreigners. We would characterize such pedagogical contexts as mono-
logic. They reinforce the dominant discourses of the public sphere and are either
unaware or actively police the multiple voices and perspectives of the counterpub-
lic, including the ways that individuals’ language practices may differ from “stand-
ard” varieties.
Monologic pedagogy and monlingualism go hand in hand. Yildiz (2012) argues
that while the notion of an individual possessing an authentic and delineated
“mother tongue” (in our case, a language other than English) would appear to val-
ue multilingualism, it actually reflects a Western monolingual paradigm whereby
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 7

language identity is used to determine inclusion/exclusion within geopolitical bor-

ders. Individuals in a postmonolingual condition (Yildiz, 2012) instead move across
nations and languages and call into question the one-to-one correspondence be-
tween the two. Educational researchers have disrupted the monolingual-
multilingual binary, characterizing it more as a continua (Hornberger, 2003) or as a
social practice of translanguaging (García, 2009) whereby speakers make use of
their bilingual repertoires in fluid ways that do not hew to idealized prescriptions or
Eurocentric language standards. Immigrant youth and families like those in our
research project have transnational experiences and language repertoires that are
by nature border-crossing, and dynamic understandings of the relationships and
tensions between monolingual and multilingual paradigms are needed to account
for their hybrid language practices.
Many of the participants in our study, whose perspectives are often excluded
from conventional civic participation due to immigration status, nonetheless en-
gage in political activity, what scholars have referred to as Latino cultural citizen-
ship (Rosaldo, 1987; Flores & Benmayor, 1997; Honeyford, 2013). Within these
counterpublics, individuals can “claim space and social rights” (Flores, 2003), enact-
ing definitions of belonging that contest the hegemony of civil society and the
boundaries between citizen and non-citizen established by the state. Following
Warner (2002), these alternative communities are not organized solely around a
political cause (for example, immigration rallies), but also entail cultural and linguis-
tic practices. Delgado Bernal, Alemán, & Carmona (2008) examine how culturally-
situated literacies such as testimonios and pláticas, and the multilingual practices
that are needed to navigate and claim rights to across spaces, help Latina/o fami-
lies and children construct alternative notions of belonging. These discursive com-
munities constitute a counterpublic premised on cultural practices that define citi-
zenship apart from the nation-state. They may work to create solidarity across
groups (e.g. “documented and undocumented”) while, by their very existence, pre-
senting a challenge to dominant ideologies that criminalize Latina/os. We believe
educators working with historically disenfranchised communities ought to consider
such counterpublics in their dialogic teaching.

4. METHODOLOGY

For the past six years, we have been involved in a research partnership with St.
Frances Cabrini parish and its school and community center. St. Frances Cabrini is a
central gathering place for immigrant and refugee communities from Vietnam, In-
donesia, the Philippines, and Latin America, and has a long-standing Italian Ameri-
can congregation as well as African American members who played an instrumen-
tal role in desegregating the church. It offers services in English, Spanish, Vietnam-
ese, Indonesian, and occasionally Tagalog, and provides opportunities for the dif-
ferent communities to sustain cultural traditions, such as through native language
youth groups and celebrations for Día de los Muertos and the Vietnamese Moon
Festival. The parish brings cultural groups together for worship, civic engagement,
8 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

and socializing. Its mission includes advocating for immigrant rights and more ex-
pansive notions of citizenship to counteract the struggles many congregants face
because of their undocumented status. St. Frances Cabrini promotes an ethos of
radical hospitality, and strives to provide a safer space for individuals who are stig-
matized within other contexts of their lives.
The overall research partnership investigates how multilingual community
members organize to provide resources for their families, and the language and
literacy practices they employ in negotiating social, cultural, linguistic, and institu-
tional boundaries. We are also interested in how people cooperate toward a
shared vision of educational justice and immigrant rights. Our collaborative re-
search combines traditional ethnographic methods (Erickson, 1986) with practi-
tioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). We embrace as a working ideal a
collaborative and transparent methodology where community members are in-
volved throughout research process (Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2015). For the
ethnographic component of our work, the four of us, alongside other graduate stu-
dent members of the research team, have been immersed at St. Frances Cabrini
several times per week, participating in parish events, attending leadership meet-
ings, and developing a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of the site. As practitioner
researchers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), we have also co-designed a series of
nested participatory research projects with community members. These initiatives
include a comics club for elementary students (conducted in yrs. 2-4 of the partner-
ship), a language and literacy class for Latina/o families and young children (con-
ducted in yrs. 2-4), a research group with Indonesian and Latina/o adolescents
(conducted in yr. 4), and action research investigating community literacies and
advocacy (conducted in yrs. 3-5).
When investigating our own practice around dialogic teaching, we adopted an
inquiry stance. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) characterize an inquiry stance as “a
worldview, a critical habit of mind” that locates teaching “within webs of social
historical, cultural, and political significance” (p. 120). They argue,
Fundamental to the notion of inquiry stance is the idea that educational practice is not
simply instrumental in the sense of figuring out how to get things done, but also and
most importantly, it is social and political in the sense of deliberating about what to
get done, why to get it done, who decides, and whose interests are served. (p. 121)

Teaching does not occur in a vacuum, and even a seemingly mundane instructional
move may be implicated in broader power dynamics. Adopting an inquiry stance
shifted our focus from implementing classroom dialogic structures to interrogating
under what conditions participants may or may not contribute to the discussion,
and how what they choose to share or not share is informed by the multiple con-
texts of their lives.
This article analyzes data from a subset of the larger partnership—the ESOL
class with Latina/o families (primarily mothers) and young children, and the Com-
munity Researchers Project (CRP), a participatory inquiry where Latina/o and Indo-
nesian youth investigated issues in their community. The two projects share signifi-
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 9

cant overlaps: they were taking place concurrently and several participants in the
family inquiry had children who were in the CRP; both involved dialogic instruction
based on issues raised by participants; and participants in both projects were vul-
nerable due to their ascribed racialized and criminalized identities. We bring to-
gether these two projects, rather than focusing on one, to signal how dialogue is
not bounded within in one space, but crosses multiple locations, people, and top-
ics.

4.1 Data Sources and Analysis

Data sources included detailed fieldnotes of inquiry group sessions, artifacts (e.g.
work produced during the sessions, parish bulletins, event flyers, local newspa-
pers), audio-recorded interviews with community members and inquiry group par-
ticipants, and researcher reflective memos. A focus on discourse (Fairclough, 2003)
helps us examine, from our disciplinary vantage point, the language and literacy
practices (Heath & Street, 2008) of participants. While we were interested in dia-
logue, we made the conscious decision not to audiorecord sessions in either of the
projects because the nature of the conversation about immigration was sensitive
and recording could have inhibited individuals from participating. Instead, we
wrote detailed fieldnotes, trying to capture individual comments as much as possi-
ble.
Data sources were reviewed and analyzed thematically (Strauss and Corbin,
1998). We initially coded our data for the social and political issues participants
raised within the inquiry group settings (including factors influencing their partici-
pation in and experiences with schooling), instances of coalition-building among
differently-situated participants, and the language and literacy practices referenced
within the inquiry groups. Data analysis was “a process of moving in analytic cir-
cles” (Creswell, 1998, p. 142) that involved an oscillation between generating cate-
gories inductively and examining the corpus through theoretical constructs (Erick-
son, 2004) in a recursive and iterative process (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). Having
identified how participants raised issues of marginalization and also the ways they
mobilized language and literacy practices to counter dominant discourses, we
turned to the concept of publics and counterpublics to help further examine these
dynamics. We returned to the data to understand how immigration was being con-
structed in the public sphere and within the counterpublic discourse communities
of the inquiry groups. For instance, we tracked specific discursive constructions
(Janks, 2010, p. 74-77), such as lexicalization of key concepts (e.g. “immigrant”)
that helped surface differences between framings (e.g. “illegal” vs. “without pa-
pers”). Following the monologic-dialogic distinction, we charted who was posi-
tioned as possessing knowledge, the underlying ideologies that circumscribed dis-
cussion, how inquiry group sessions were negotiated among participants, and mo-
ments of resistance that shifted the nature of the topics under study.
10 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

5. FINDINGS

Our analysis of the nested research projects spotlighted in this article—the ESOL
class with Latina/o young children and families, and the Community Researchers
Project with Indonesian and Latina/o youth—reveals two valences of community
members’ dialogic engagement: a critique of the systemic inequities and participa-
tion in a counterpublic that highlights transnational and multilingual knowledge.
The following examples, one featuring Ángela and the other her son Pablo, illus-
trate the dialogic nature of the respective projects.

5.1 Fostering Dialogue through “Class News”

In the Latina/o family ESOL class (facilitated by María Paula and Alicia), we invited
caretakers and young children to utilize multiple languages, literacies, and cultural
practices to investigate pressing community issues. We employed a number of
strategies to create teaching/learning opportunities where the knowledge and lan-
guage practices of the Latina/o families were an integral part of the curriculum. For
example, the 2-hour weekly sessions were facilitated in both Spanish and English,
and we encouraged participants to use all their languages and language varieties
for meaning-making. Pedagogical structures alternated between joint inquiries that
involved both adults and young children working together, and times when each of
the groups explored the same theme separately in age-appropriate ways. The par-
ticipants transacted with real-world texts of their choosing, such as menus from
pricey restaurants where they prepped food and notes from bosses at houseclean-
ing services, to foreground their own questions and interrogate issues of power.
They utilized their multiple perspectives and their language and literacy resources
to teach us and each other about critical issues in their lives while learning the Eng-
lish necessary to address day-to-day concerns. Such pedagogies aspired to cultivate
a joint learning community that was not centered on the monologic transmission of
skills as determined by the university-based facilitators. In fact, during the first
months of our time together, one of the mothers brought in a Spanish-language
grammar book to give to a graduate student helping out on the project, thus un-
derscoring that there were skills to be learned by all involved and overturning pre-
conceptions of who is considered a “language learner.”
One generative routine for our ongoing inquiries was the “Class News”. The
mothers took turns going around the room and sharing any news they had that
week, which were recorded on chart paper and used to spark discussion, teach
specific language elements, or plan future inquiries. The Class News grounded our
inquiry community in the issues facing families, and also provided opportunities to
attend to the technical aspects of language and literacy learning parents had envi-
sioned for the course (such as, for example, possessives and verb tenses). Written
up, the Class News for each session can be thought of as a dialogically-constructed
artifact. Each line represents a summary of each topic of conversation raised by the
participants, rendered by the preferred phrasing of the person sharing.
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 11

One such artifact, depicted in Figure 1, is illustrative of the range of issues

shared by families as they participated in this discursive counterpublic.

Figure 1. Sample Class News write-up

Emilia, a member of the inquiry group who was also actively involved in a Latina/o
immigrant rights organization, began the Class News for this day by sharing two
activist events. The first was a vigil against the closing of city public schools, at
which 16 community leaders had been arrested. The protests were a response to
the draconian school district budget cuts that would result, later that year, in the
shutting down of 24 schools and a significant reduction of services, including nurs-
es, social workers, teachers and other staff to some of the poorest areas of the city.
The closing of schools was a recurring topic in our inquiry group. Parents were con-
cerned, for example, about their ability to take the children to school without cars
or drivers’ licenses when public transportation was often unreliable, and about
how the relocation away from their own neighborhoods would impact children’s
physical and emotional wellbeing. Julio, a kindergarten student, rejoiced in a Class
News activity a few months later that “salvaron a mi escuela” [they saved my
school] (Artifact excerpt, Feb. 2013), a testament to children’s awareness of these
issues and to the potential power of a collective action. Unfortunately, many
schools were ultimately closed despite these efforts.
During this particular Class News session, Emilia spread the word about a march
for immigrant rights, urging others in the group to attend. Scholars note that un-
documented status exacerbates social duress through more intangible factors like
fear of deportation or discrimination (Banki, 2013). Immigration status was a cross-
cutting theme that impacted many of the issues participants identified, and it be-
12 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

came clear that participation in a counterpublic provided a degree of respite and

solidarity for the families.
The discussion turned to health concerns when Andrea shared that a classmate
of her daughter’s had died a few days prior as a result of an asthma attack. Ángela
was particularly alarmed because both she and her two children also suffered from
asthma, and with budget cuts schools often lacked essential nursing staff. Health
insurance was also difficult to come by given the contingent nature of their jobs
and the labor exploitation that often occurs when immigrant workers have little
alternative but to participate in the informal economy (Lopez, 2006). Sara shared
that a friend had passed away because, without health care, her cancer had not
been detected and treated in its early stages. This tragedy was compounded by the
militarization of the border: Sara recounted that her friend’s body could not be
returned to the family she left behind in Mexico, including the son she had not
seen since he was a baby. The conversation also prompted Sara to tell the group
about a mobile health van that was coming to St. Frances Cabrini to conduct breast
cancer screenings. One had to make an appointment in order to take advantage of
this service, a task that intimidated many of the recent immigrants who could not
communicate in English and were reluctant to write personal details on official
forms. Sara nevertheless provided everyone with the name and number of a Span-
ish-speaking nurse involved in the initiative who would be able to assist in schedul-
ing the exam. She chose to represent her contribution to the Class News chart with
the phrase, “Sara says please go to the doctor.” The Class News activity both made
visible the social and economic struggles faced by Latina/o families, but also helped
members of our inquiry group pool collective resources.
Joyful solidarity is also part of the dialogue of the counterpublic. Following the
group’s sobering conversation about death, family separation, and immigration,
Ángela shifted the discussion, noting “tengo muchos pesares pero quiero compartir
algo más positivo” [I have a lot of struggles but I want to share something more
positive]. She went on to recount that she cut her hair and “donated it to children
with cancer,” a concrete action she could personally take to ease the suffering of
others. Other joyful news included the birth of children or, on this occasion, the
election of the first Latin American pope. The families saw this new leadership as
an important turning point in the church, signaling greater representation of Lati-
nos within an institution historically dominated by Europeans. Through dialogue
around the Class News routine, the mothers, who were of Mexican descent,
worked to construct a pan-Latina transnational identity whereby spiritual affilia-
tions may transcend nationhood and immigration status. Drawing on the discursive
counterpublic provided opportunities for all involved to participate in edifying dia-
logue, moments of mutual learning and affective connection.
Through the Class News routine, the Latina mothers were able to “disclose rela-
tionships of power” (Ansen, 2000, p. 24) not typically referenced in discussions of
immigration within the dominant public sphere, emphasizing many intersecting
social issues that affect their experiences as immigrants to the U.S. Their conversa-
tions made visible their vulnerability to neoliberal policies that erode social sup-
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 13

ports such as public schooling and healthcare. They noted, as well, the role that
language ideologies and race played in these oppressions. One participant com-
mented that she and her family experienced racism in the neighborhood school,
where “se molestan que no hablen inglés pero ellos no pasan del ingles” [people
get upset that one doesn’t speak English but they don’t go beyond English]. This
comment captures the paradox of how Latina/os were being positioned as defi-
cient due to their emergent knowledge of English, when in fact by acquiring the
language they had surpassed the monolingual standard by which they were being
judged. Being Mexican made this issue not merely linguistic, but racialized as well,
and families made connections between these comments and assumptions regard-
ing their immigration status. One of the mothers, Bendición, nonetheless encour-
aged her peers to speak up, exclaiming that “tenemos derechos” [we have rights],
and that, moreover, “los niños tienen derechos” [the children have rights]. For the
sake of their children, Bendición urged others to not walk with their heads lowered
because of being Mexican, no matter what discrimination they may experience.
Through their discussions, including those fostered in our Class News, the Latina
mothers connected their lived experiences and concerns to a larger supranational
discourse of human rights.
The mothers in the ESOL class both referenced and participated in a counter-
public dialogue that complicates the identities of “immigrant,” and which, following
Fraser (1997), allows them to create “oppositional interpretations of their identi-
ties, interests, and needs.” These oppositional interpretations include shifting the
focus from an individual who enters the U.S. “legally” or “illegally,” to a systemic
perspective that names racism, language ideologies, and economic inequality as
part of the immigrant experience. Through a dialogic structure like the Class News,
the Latina mothers reframe the debates about immigration, and in doing so, also
advocate for their community’s rights. As practitioner researchers at St. Frances
Cabrini, we were able co-construct learning opportunities with the Latina/o families
that enabled participants to negotiate meaning and connect their personal experi-
ences to larger social, political, and historical dynamics.

5.2 Youth Research as Dialogic Inquiry

Every other weekend during the 2013-2014 school year, Latina/o and Indonesian
youth between the ages of 10 and 14 gathered in the basement of St. Frances
Cabrini’s community center to explore high-quality nonfiction texts and research
questions that arose from their own experiences and concerns. This participatory
inquiry—the Community Researchers Project—understood the immigrant youth to
be cosmopolitan intellectuals who inherited, through their communities,
knowledge derived from legacies of social struggle and activism (Campano & Ghiso,
2011). Students learned about and utilized various research methodologies to in-
vestigate their own questions, and also saw their communities as sites of
knowledge. A commitment to dialogic teaching meant that while we (Gerald and
Grace, alongside other members of the research team) began the project with spe-
14 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

cific curricular guidelines, our pedagogy shifted in accordance with students’ re-
search directions.
For each session of the Community Researchers Project, we provided a collabo-
rative structure and open-ended prompts which the youth could interpret in a
range of ways (for example, by using different genres, modalities, and languages,
and by situating questions within their own topics and experiences). Initially, the
class sessions centered on exploring nonfiction texts and on surfacing a range of
possible interests to research. As the sessions progressed, our guidance focused on
choosing particular topics to investigate, planning for the inquiries, and discussing
and representing on-going findings.
The Community Researchers Project was originally conceived at the request of
parents at St. Frances Cabrini, who wanted to support their children in the curricu-
lar push for analyzing nonfiction that was part of new school standards (Campano,
Ngo, & Player, 2015). Leaders from the various cultural communities at the parish
met to co-design the project and to select the books to be used; more texts were
added once the youth’s inquiries were underway so they would have nonfiction
resources to complement their investigations. The chosen texts resonate with the
counterpublic discourse at St. Frances Cabrini and challenge deficit representations
of the community prevalent in public framings. The books reflect the riches of the
neighborhood (When Marian Sang [Ryan, 2002], about an African American operat-
ic singer from the area; or Neighborhood Odes [Soto, 2005], a collection of poems
blending English and Spanish), the unequal policies that impact historically minori-
tized groups (Getting Away with Murder [Crowe, 2003] unpacks the racialized kill-
ing of Emmett Till that was a catalyst for the civil rights movement; Tenement [Bial,
2002] and Denied Detained Deported [Bausum, 2009] showcase discriminatory
treatment of immigrants), and the power of coalitions in working for social change
(e.g. As Good as Anybody [Michelson, 2008], which depicts the partnership be-
tween Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Joshua Hershel in fighting for civil and
human rights).
The books selected in conversation with community leaders provided an inter-
pretive landscape that highlighted community strengths and social struggles perti-
nent to the experiences of families and youth at St. Frances Cabrini, topics that are
often excluded from official school curricula. For example, in Denied, Detained,
Deported (Bausum, 2009), the immigration experience unsettles the legal/illegal
binary reinforced in many media outlets in our city by calling attention to how poli-
cies can be misguided, exclusionary, or racist. A representative snippet from the
introduction reads:
These stories represent the dark side of U.S. immigration history. They aren’t just iso-
lated goofs of public policy, random mistakes made once and never repeated. They
range from the deliberate exclusion of Chinese emigrants during the 19 th century to
the exploitation of Mexican workers during the 20th century. And they echo through
the nation’s history right up to the present day. (p. 10)

The “dark side” is a counter-story to positive images of the U.S. as a welcome ref-
uge for immigrant communities, and the text strives to portray the systemic nature
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 15

of these policies through showcasing what they are not (“isolated”, “random,” a
“goof”, a “mistake”), asserting how “deliberate” (as opposed to unintended) they
are, and naming their humanitarian consequences (“exclusion”; “exploitation”)
across time periods and cultural groups. By counterpoint, terms used to denote the
individuals subject to these policies highlight their humanity: they are “emigrants”
who leave a place of origin rather than being defined solely by the new place they
enter and “workers” who make economic and social contributions. This framing of
the immigrant experience that emphasizes work, human vulnerability, and human
rights was also the type of discourse that circulated within the parish and across
our respective projects. For example, the youth’s research projects encompassed
topics such as health care inequities, work conditions experienced by their families,
and the rights for all to have access to a high quality education.
One of the students participating in the Community Researchers Project was
Pablo, Ángela’s ten year-old son. Across the year, Pablo demonstrated an interest
in social justice. He brought up questions regarding violence in his neighborhood,
school closings, and stop and frisk policies (Fig. 2).

[Neighborhood name]

Figure 2. Pablo’s jottings in his research notebook

Pablo’s questions probe the systemic forces that produce gentrification, education-
al inequities, and the criminalization of people of color. Rather than locate blame
on vulnerable populations, as would be the case through nominalizations (Janks,
16 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

2010, p. 74) such as “criminals” or “illegals,” Pablo focuses on the process by which
people become marginalized (“get[ting] shot or arrested” or being stopped by po-
lice). The use of specific pronouns can denote inclusivity or exclusivity (Janks, 2010,
p. 76). Pablo uses the pronoun “they” to refer to systems of power that close
schools or profile individuals of color, in contrast to his own identification as part of
the community (“our” neighborhood). He repeatedly states, “I will ask,” agentively
characterizing himself as a researcher rather than one researched upon, with the
modal “will” conveying certainty (Janks, 2010, p. 75) in his ability to pursue these
social justice inquiries.
Pablo eventually settled on the question “Why do people vandalize?” based on
his observations of the differences between the appearance of certain neighbor-
hoods, which seemed to have a lot of public art, and his neighborhood, where, he
noted, walls were covered with “just words on old buildings” (Fieldnotes, March,
2014). Throughout the project, Pablo gravitated to visual imagery, filling his note-
books with jottings and comics as a means of exploring ideas and recording his
thinking. The focus of his research was a new topic for him, and blended his inter-
est in aesthetics with social justice concerns. In our sessions, we provided time for
youth to discuss with one another their emerging investigations, and then decide
where they would take their inquiries next. We gave the following instructions:
“Write or draw—what’s the first step you’re going to take after today to continue
your research project?” Pablo decided to mine the affordances of visuals in re-
sponding to this curricular invitation (Fig. 3). Prior to this session, we had asked the
youth to see how different authors represented their data in nonfiction books in
order to inform how they might convey their findings, and Pablo and his peers had
spent time sketching the layout of their books and thinking about what modalities
(e.g. comics, pictures, graphs, verbal text) would best represent their information.
While these activities possibly informed Pablo’s spatial depiction of his research
plan, his visual explorations throughout the Community Researchers Project also
influenced our own teaching, making it more open to multimodal forms of inquiry.
Pablo’s research plan roots his inquiries in his neighborhood, whereby his multi-
lingual and transnational community is a site of knowledge generation. Through
verbal and visual texts, the map traces Pablo’s path as a researcher, pursuing his
inquiry by linking with various people. He lists the first step as “interview my
mom,” and then draws himself into his research as a stick figure following a dotted
line that leads him to interviews with community members and to consultations
with his “research team”. The completion of his research plan is marked by the
words “mission complete.” While many dominant paradigms of research depict a
linear process, Pablo takes a circuitous route in order to meet face to face with the
various informants in his neighborhood, a slow but intentional investigative trajec-
tory.
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 17

Figure 3. Pablo’s map of data collection for his inquiry

Pablo’s plan showcases the multiple linguistic resources he mobilizes in his inquiry
and the dynamic nature of his language and literacy practices. He references his
translanguaging practices (García, 2009) when he writes, “interview with my mom
(in spanish also write them in spanish) (and mix it).” Pablo acknowledges his ability
to communicate with the linguistically diverse members of his community as he
“mixes” languages to both access and express the findings from his inquiry. This
18 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

assertion points to the postmonolingual condition (Yildiz, 2012) by challenging

dominant notions of both “English Only” as well as of a “balanced bilingual” who
does not “mix” languages. It reflects “an approach to bilingualism that is centered
not on the constructed notion of standard languages…but on the practices of bilin-
guals that are readily observable” (García, 2009, p. 377). Pablo intends to use
translanguaging and follows his plan the parenthetical “(LOL)”, denoting his partici-
pation in youth culture and digital media. By “laughing out loud” at his proposition
to “mix” languages, Pablo signals his awareness of how his language may be judged
as deviating from a valued norm, and also his desire to engage in these practices
nonetheless. Pablo’s multilingual tongue does not belong to just one country, one
community, or one culture. He can’t be essentialized and to attempt to do so
would deny him both access to and expression of his diverse social world.
In addition to his linguistic resources, Pablo’s knowledge is also based on his
participation in a dynamic community. The people he interviews share with him
differing perspectives on “vandalism,” and introduce the notion that people may
“vandalize buildings to express themselves.” His research report complicates a pub-
lic view of graffiti by making a distinction between vandalism and public art (Fig. 4).
Although he doesn’t arrive at a critique of the systemic causes of vandalism, he
nonetheless challenges purely deficit representations of city neighborhoods.
Pablo relies on many people in his qualitative inquiry. He names specific friends
as well as a few “random person(s)” as interviewees. It is important to note that he
doesn’t reference the need to turn to books or the Internet for information. In-
stead, he sees his community as the primary source of knowledge. He draws on
established relationships with community members but also displays a willingness
to engage new people he may encounter to assist him in his scholarly pursuits.
Pablo is both researching and cultivating membership in a counterpublic that, we
speculate, may largely be excluded from the “public” of his public school. In the
dialogic context of the Community Researchers Project, however, this counterpub-
lic comes alive.
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 19

31

Figure 4. Pablo’s summary of his research and findings

In both the family ESOL class and the Community Researchers Project, we sought to
co-create learning spaces that were in dialogue with community members’
knowledge and interests. Pablo and his mother Ángela, like others in our research
project, navigate multiple and at-times contesting representations of immigration.
20 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

For example, they participate in a local activist organization, where Pablo has
learned from testimonials of individuals with undocumented immigration status
about the experiences of many in the Latina/o community, including some of his
family members, while recognizing the privileges he has from being born in the
country. In public, however, Pablo has been the target of xenophobic threats aimed
at “illegals” and has witnessed social inequities firsthand. His mother Ángela shares
with us:
A lot of things happen on the streets. We sometimes see accidents or problems that
happen, sometimes people that are on the streets and that has helped us a lot to see
and say why, why is this so? We have been treated very badly on the street, without
having done anything sometimes people offend us or shout at us, they do a lot of
things to us but that has also helped us to become stronger and we talk a lot about the
reason why it is like that, or why there is poor treatment of us and I always tell him:
“You have to study, you have to study because it will be the best way to show what
you are and that despite the way you are treated in any place, with your studies you
will be able to defend yourself”. So I say that to him and he also says the same thing to
me: "You have to learn English! And nobody will be helping you and there will be a
time when you will be alone and what you're going to do? Learn because you are in a
country where it is needed and you have to learn”…That is what helps the two of us
have hope, because we talk about what we see happening. We go outside to the park
to talk, we sit hours and hours and that is what helps us, the communication. [Inter-
view Excerpt, July 2015]

It is evident that Ángela and Pablo are engaged in on-going dialogue about social
justice, survival, and the possibilities of education to provide a more secure life.
They are reading the world (Freire, 1970)—situating specific experiences and strug-
gles, whether their own or those of others, within broader social and political dy-
namics. In their day-to-day lives, they participate in a subaltern counterpublic that
provides a corrective to deficit representations of their experiences and of their
neighborhood. Communication and inquiry (e.g. “we talk about the reason why it is
like that”) are ways to make visible power dynamics. They are also forms of action
that foster hope. Youth and families’ counterpublics can become a profound cur-
ricular resource in educational contexts, both in- and out-of-school.

6. AN INQUIRY STANCE INTO DIALOGIC PEDAGOGY

A close examination of the data reveals that the participants indeed did not share
their lives in what might be characterized as a merely confessional mode, and we
understand the reservations to such an approach. It may too easily lead to evaluat-
ing people as “felons” or “good immigrants,” a traumatized victim or a hero who,
through talent and hard work, achieves the American Dream. Irrespective of how
an immigrant is evaluated, a focus on personal stories abstracted from larger social
and political dynamics may contribute to the myth of the autonomous agent who
makes good or bad choices in a meritocratic society. This is the individualist ideolo-
gy that circumscribes discourse in the dominant public sphere. Instead, Ángela,
Pablo and the other women and children in our study participated in a discourse
community that reflected collective intellectual and activist engagement around
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 21

systemic issues, thus challenging the characterization of immigrant communities as

either criminals or the passive benefactors of others’ hospitality.
How, given the realities of a dominant public sphere that scapegoats communi-
ties, can we foster dialogue in educational settings? An inquiry stance, which situ-
ates teaching and learning within larger sociopolitical contexts, has taught us that
trust, intellectual respect, and political solidarity are preconditions for dialogic
teaching, especially when working with minoritized communities. It has also helped
us discern how community members are agents within counterpublic spheres, and
how a dialogic pedagogy might mobilize their knowledge, commitments, and in-
quiries in the classroom.

6.1 Building Trust and Political Solidarity

Dialogic teaching, especially across difference, requires a foundation of trust. The

families in the inquiry group and students such as Pablo needed to feel relatively
safe to voice their insights and questions. An inquiry stance views teaching as social
and political rather than merely neutral (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), and thus
shifts these considerations to the forefront of the classroom. Dialogic teaching in
both our examples was possible because we cultivated relationships as part of a
long-term partnership with St. Frances Cabrini. Our curriculum developed over time
with community members’ input. In the tradition of practitioner research, this form
of systematic improvisation allowed us to “incorporate their ever-evolving experi-
ences into the class” (Campano, 2007). The projects also built on previous collabo-
ration; for example, master’s students in Gerald’s courses had been part of an an-
nual “PennPal” exchange with children in the Sunday school, and a number of
these youth went on to be part of the CRP. Parish leaders were also vocal advo-
cates for immigrant rights, and the research collaboration suggested our own soli-
darity with this cause. We were transparent about how our political stance was in
part shaped by our own immigrant family backgrounds and by prior involvement
with activist organizations in the counterpublic. Genuine dialogic teaching might
not have been possible had trust and political solidarity not been built over time.

6.2 Listening to People’s Experiences and Knowledge Claims

An important aspect of dialogic teaching is the reciprocity of listening to each oth-

er’s ideas (Alexander, 2006, as cited in Boyd & Markarian, 2011). An inquiry stance
helps complicate the notion of listening with regards to issues of power, because it
entails interrogating our own identities vis-à-vis those with whom we are in dia-
logue. A person may be listening, but that does not imply that he/she is hearing
accurately (Mohanty, 1997) or that there is an egalitarian relationship. What is
heard in any interaction is invariably filtered through one’s own interpretive lenses.
Individuals from historically minoritized communities, like the youth and families in
our partnership, may experience what Fricker (2007, p. 1) describes as testimonial
injustice: “when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated sense of credibility to
22 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

the speaker’s words” thereby undermining her/his “capacity as a knower.” For ex-
ample, it was evident from the mothers’ discussions in the family literacy/ESOL
class that many were activist parents who were advocating for their children’s edu-
cation, and that they had garnered astute understandings of educational inequities
in the district. However, because they were Spanish-speaking (which as one mother
noted “people get upset” about) and of Mexican descent, their concerns were of-
ten dismissed or unheard. An inquiry stance encourages researchers and practi-
tioners to reflect on their own social locations and what these may reveal or ob-
scure. This self-reflexivity can make them more attuned to the ways in which fami-
lies’ and youth’s histories, experiences, and identities productively inform their
capacities to make meaningful interpretations and claims.

6.3 Building Curriculum from Participants’ Inquiries

Dialogic teaching involves building on learner’s ideas and “chain[ing] them in co-
herent lines of thinking and inquiry” (Alexander, 2006, as cited in Boyd, 2011, p.
518). Because an inquiry stance asks critical questions about practice, such as who
decides what gets done and whose interests are served by a classroom interaction,
it may help educators become sensitized to topics that matter to families but re-
main invisible in the dominant public sphere. In both projects, our curricular invita-
tions grew out of participants’ discussions and interests. The Community Research-
ers Project began at the request of community leaders and was structured from the
outset around youth investigating questions that mattered to them. This meant
that their focus at times diverted from our own expectations. For example, instead
of explicitly exploring immigration as we had initially assumed, youth talked about
and researched medical issues because their own families struggled with access to
adequate care (Campano, Ngo, & Player, 2015). In the family ESOL class, the issues
raised during the Class News routine became a mechanism for co-constructing cur-
riculum. For example, the mothers’ testimonios of their difficulties accessing mono-
lingual school contexts led to a series of bilingual explorations about communi-
cating with educators. Families compared and contrasted schooling in Mexico and
the United States using the language of their choosing, and based on this discussion
we introduced relevant vocabulary in English that participants used to write and
role-play conversations with their children’s teachers and administrators. In both
projects, our pedagogy linked participants’ classroom dialogue with discussions of
equity and access occurring within their counterpublics.

6.4 Navigating Tensions Dialogically

One of the paradoxes of taking an inquiry stance is that, while we adhered to an

overall dialogic orientation, there were aspects of the class sessions that were os-
tensibly taught monologically. Boyd and Markarian (2011) caution against the over-
simplification of dialogic teaching, noting that “the outward appearances of partic-
ular instances of talk structures in a classroom are not necessarily the best indica-
 MULTILINGUAL COUNTERPUBLICS 23

tors of the underlying dynamic of the learning of the classroom” (p. 517), so that,
for example, open questions typically associated with dialogism may be in the ser-
vice of a monologic stance. Our pedagogy in the family ESOL class at times involved
direct instruction of specific language elements, with instances of “repeat after
me” to hone pronunciation and teacher directed known-answer questions used to
review specific vocabulary or verb conjugations. These features became part of the
class because participants asked for their inclusion. We would learn through our
research that families had a great deal of investment in the interactional patterns
associated with school in Latin America. As participatory educators and research-
ers, we viewed these traditional arrangements—illustrative of the banking model
of education (Freire, 1970)—with skepticism. However, we learned that the fami-
lies, many of whom felt as if their own educational trajectories had been prema-
turely curtailed, wanted the opportunity to take up successful academic identities
in the ways that were conventionally valued. They negotiated and traversed multi-
ple publics in their lives. An inquiry stance enabled us to be less dogmatic and more
sensitive of the situated nature of the families’ desires for the class.

7. CONCLUSION: DIALOGUE AND EPISTEMIC HUMILITY

Freire (1998) identifies humility as a virtue of dialogue that “helps us understand

this obvious truth: No one knows it all; no one ignorant of everything. We all know
something; we are all ignorant of something” (p. 39). We would like to add to this
insight by suggesting that epistemic humility also entails an acknowledgement that
there are often multiple dialogues occurring around some of our most significant
shared inquiries, including: Who counts as an American? What languages have val-
ue? Who deserves access to high quality schools and health care? Who, invoking
Arendt (1976), has the “right to have rights” (p. 298)? And who can generate
knowledge about the world and bring about change? Through the Class News and
the Community Researchers Project, the mothers and youth we worked with were
co-constructing meaning around these questions as part of their participation in a
robust multilingual counterpublic sphere. One implication is that a precondition for
dialogue might entail all members of a learning community—students, parents,
researchers, and teachers alike—to actively cultivate membership in a plurality of
counterpublics as a means of addressing power asymmetries and learning from
each other.
This article hopes to contribute to this themed issue on international perspec-
tives on dialogic theory and practice by examining the conditions within which dial-
ogism is even possible, especially for multilingual immigrant families and youth. In
classrooms governed by monologic instruction, where knowledge is sought to be
the neutral transmission of pre-set objectives, students’ complex realities will likely
become homogenized through standardization and their own inquiries will have
very little purchase on the curriculum (Campano, 2007; Caughlan & Juzwik, 2014).
Even if students feel as if their multilingual transnational experiences are not ade-
quately represented in school, they may decide that it is just “too complicated”
24 M. P. GHISO, G. CAMPANO, G. PLAYER & A. RUSOJA

(Ghiso & Campano, 2013, p. 262) to speak back to dominant discourses and ideolo-
gies. Sometimes they sense, rightfully, that engaging in dialogue and sharing their
stories could put them and their families risk. One implication of our research in-
volves the need for schools to dialogically include the robust multilingual counter-
publics of their students’ home and neighborhood communities into the curricu-
lum. This may initially be done through developing partnerships with local organi-
zations and viewing parents and community leaders as partners who have critical
knowledge about the potential role of education in a participatory democracy.

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