This symposium explores the meaning and implications in elementary classrooms and in teacher education of dialogue and reflection that either includes or excludes multiple voices (Bakhtin’s, 1986) in the US, Pakistan, and Spain. Participants focus on classrooms and international teacher trainings as sites to explore the meaning and processes of dialogue, reflection, and contesting to both in different socio-cultural contexts. These experiences reveal the possibilities and challenges of creating dialogic environments in classrooms and teacher education programs and inform of a wider conception of “dialogue”.

This symposium expands our understanding of the theoretical concept of dialogue as enacted by students, teachers, and communities in diverse national contexts. In the cases presented, successful dialogue implies paying attention to issues of power and inequality in social relations, particularly, when working with children and adults with different cultural background. The panel also shows that quality teaching and teacher education can be achieved through inclusive dialogue with all the social agents involved. The different cases presented support a notion of dialogue that implies considering difference in social relations, the need to situate dialogue and reflection in the socio-cultural context where it develops, and the risk to reduce both dialogue and reflection to a pedagogical method or technique. The different research studies presented involve teachers in different ways, and provide insights on how to train teachers to successfully employ dialogue and reflection as well as they share ideas to improve teacher education in relation to using tools for thought and reflection, such as the ePortfolio. The analysis is even wider as the panel includes the need for fostering dialogue with teachers from the community for transnational education projects to be effective.

The first paper analyses the discourse presented by teachers with regards to social justice and the conflict to a certain level encountered with the comprehension strategies implemented on the activity of book reading. The paper shows teacher discourses that may hinder or avoid the personal engagement of students in and through a text. The second paper examines the dialogic stance of teachers engaged in classrooms organized in Interactive Groups. Through a case study of IG in a second-third grade classroom in an elementary school serving one of the most marginalized Romani neighbourhoods in Spain, the author claims a global dialogic stance in the teachers, which implies seeking egalitarian dialogue with the Romani volunteers in the classroom, capitalizing on their cultural intelligence to improve their teaching, and engaging in transformative relations. The third paper reports reflections of a teacher educator using ePortfolios as a dialogic and non-evaluative space to facilitate prospective teachers to reflect on their student teaching experience. Finally, the fourth paper, based on 15-month-long ethnographic research, explores how women teachers, recruited and trained by a transnational development organization supporting schools for rural and low-income communities in Pakistan, assemble and perform wisdom as a virtue of educated people.