Dialogic Literary Gatherings in Primary Education. A case study

Abstract

In most current schools, an educational system focused on the vertical transmission of knowledge as a teaching model where teachers occupy the dominant position in the teacherstudent relationship predominates. In particular, reading is traditionally considered as a skill to develop from an individual, mechanical and ritualistic approach. From this perspective, the educational institution has serious problems to carry out its mission that is to educate its students to become critical, responsible and educated future citizens of democratic societies. Due to the desire of knowing about educational proposals with a dialogical learning approach that helps to achieve such objectives, this research studies the Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG) that take place in a Primary Education classroom of a public school in Málaga, where reading itself is an activity that contributes to this objective. The methodology used has been the case study, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews as the main information gathering techniques. The results from a qualitative analysis show how and why DLG are carried out in a specific classroom and what the experience, impressions and opinions of students and teachers involved in them are. This allows us to get a better understanding of this practice within a real educational context.