Cultivating Dialogic Learning: A Narrative-Pedagogical Approach to Teaching Chinese Vernacular Stories
Spark Talk
Abstract
This presentation explores pedagogical approaches to cultivating students’ dialogic learning by drawing from classroom activities from an undergraduate course on masterworks from vernacular narratives. Drawing from Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) and his theory of dialogism, the instructor focuses on developing conversational activities in an undergraduate classroom for students to understand dialogic paradigms in vernacular short stories and to develop conversational and performative activities to deepen interpretations of these texts or reenact creative adaptations of them. The presentation shares a range of activities that were developed to cultivate students’ dialogic learning. These include adaptations through performance, “what-if” questions, debate posters, character interviews, character tweeting, hexagonal thinking, theatrical exquisite corpse, drum tales, modernizing the tale through rap, children’s nursery rhyme, rock & roll, visualizing the tale through illustrations with ballade or poetry annotations. These dialogic activities were purportedly developed as highly adaptable practices to enhance in-class conversations that could allow students to relate historical narratives to their lived personal situations, to introduce diverse critical perspectives in discussion, to provide pluralist and continuous feedback for each other, to facilitate collegial conversational exchange through low-risk, instantaneous, easy-to-prepare, and humorous collective participation. Each crafted for completion in ten to twenty minutes, these dialogic conversational activities allow students to understand and re-enact the oral traditions underlying vernacular storytelling, lower the risks in critical interpretation tasks, encourage more frequent and spontaneous classroom participation, and more importantly, endow students maximum freedom in articulating personal understanding and points of view through a diverse range of aesthetic forms.
Presenters
Li Guo
Professor
Li Guo is a Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies in World Languages and Cultures at Utah State University. She teaches a wide range of courses at USU, including Chinese language courses at intermediate and advanced levels, Chinese and Sinophone Literature, Film and Culture in Chinese, as well as courses on Asian Literature, Culture and Film. Aligned with the learning demand of our Chinese program students, her recent teaching focus is on Chinese language courses at intermediate high and advanced low levels, as well as Chinese and Sinophone literature and film courses in Chinese for advanced low and advanced mid level CFL learners.