Classroom Discourse and Democracy ─ Making Meanings Together

This book provides practitioners and scholars with a number of practical tools for studying and implementing democratic learning processes within schools, and theorizes these tools in relation to current developmental learning and democratic theory. Three dimensions of knowledge are framed – foundational, expert, and personal – and the place of each in the construction of democratic classroom understandings is explored. Based on a two-part analysis of the roles students played in a number of pedagogically diverse classroom discussions, three different forms of learning experience are then presented – teacher-led, student-led, and co-led learning. While all three forms of learning experience are seen as valuable to a fully realized democratic pedagogy, each form is shown to possess a distinctive set of affordances and constraints in relation to the many varied challenges involved in fostering children’s academic growth and learning.

Susan Jean Mayer received her doctorate in education from Harvard University and currently lectures at Brandeis and Northeastern Universities. Her published articles have treated a range of issues related to democratic PK-12 practice and social science methods. Mayer is managing editor of the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and founding vice-president of the non-profit Critical Explorers, which conducts inquiry-based curricular research and design residencies within urban middle schools (criticalexplorers.org).