This symposium explores dialogue and interaction in Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG), a dialogic learning environment that improves reading skills, communicative abilities and promotes school-community links. This activity has been identified in previous EU-funded large scale research, the INCLUD-ED project (6th Framework Programme, European Commission, 2006-2011) as a Successful Educational Action (SEA). Evidences indicate that SEAs are characterized for leading to best results in achievement and social cohesion in many different contexts (Flecha and Soler, 2013). The DLG, in particular, have shown being successfully transferred across educational levels, ages, cultures and countries.

The DLG are grounded in dialogic understandings of teaching and learning. It is rooted in the socio-cultural theory of Vygotsky (1962, 1978). In the DLG, learning takes place at the social level, where participants –children, young, adults- use the language as a tool for sharing their ideas about the reading. Dialogue is crucial for internalizing the higher psychological functions. The gatherings share basic principles with Freire’s culture circles (1973) and are based in the dialogic learning (Flecha, 2000). The DLG started in the early 1980s in Barcelona (Spain) in a very deprived neighbourhood (Sánchez, 1999).  In the DLG families, community’ members, young and children, most of them with low SES, migrant and/or with minority background, read and discuss classical literature (i.e. Tolstoy, Joyce, Shakespeare, Homer, etc.).

The symposium papers report data from two European and two national research projects. The projects at the European level are INCLUD-ED and ChiPE and, the projects at the national level are Dialogic Reading and Dialogic Literary Gatherings in prisons. The 4 projects have been conducted under the Communicative Methodology (Puigvert, Christou, & Holford, 2012), an approach based on the premise that scientific knowledge is constructed through dialogue between the researchers and the participants in the research. Qualitative data has been collected and analysed. Data presented in this symposium includes life stories, focus groups, classroom observations and interviews. The findings provide evidence that the impact of the DLG is not only on the learning process but also in promoting sociocultural transformations of the environment, transforming the interactions and expectations of the individuals participating in them (Serrano, Mirceva and Larena, 2010).

The first paper presents the implementation of the DLG in early years education in a deprived neighbourhood of Spain. This case indicates that children 3 to 5 years accelerate literacy acquisition and emotional development. The second one examines the DLG in two primary classrooms in Spain and UK, where children in Y6 read and discuss the same book, specifically, it shows ways in which gatherings work to create more inclusive epistemic climate capitalising on children’s “funds of knowledge”. The third paper presents two cases of educative participation of families in culturally diverse settings. One refers to the participation of  migrant mothers in DLG in a urban primary school in Spain; the second case is the participation of parents in dialogic reading activities in a primary school in Malta. Finally, the fourth presents how DLG are being transferred to prisons and the impact developed in the relationships with their families, especially with their school age children.