Song of the week: Developing we-for-us dialogic values

In this paper we elucidate ways the deeper interactional underpinnings of dialogic discourse are found in the deep characteristics of the local classroom community. We analyse how, over one school year, a teacher promoted development of shared community values in her classroom of seven and eight-year-olds in the United States. We elaborate on the concept of a purposive value orientation in dialogic pedagogy. We show how the teacher used the social practice of Song of the Week (SOTW) to mediate the embodiment, enactment, and development of a shared ‘chronotope’ of ‘our community values’. We argue that a dialogic value-orientation positively impacts how the talk and interaction of language and literacy practices are taken up in a classroom community. Our guiding research question was: In what ways does Song of the Week promote and develop shared community values in this second-grade classroom? Part of a two-year ethnographic case study, SOTW data included 55 days of video and transcripts (about four hours), field notes, lesson plans, interviews, and student poll and SOTW journals. We conducted discourse analysis of songs and talk about SOTW. Findings detail how the teacher carefully selected SOTW (from commercially available pre-recorded music tracks of songs by various musical artists) not only because they connected with the curriculum, but also for how she wanted the children to feel, and most significantly for the values that the songs contextualised. Findings also show how daily singing and talking about SOTW mediated the development of value-laden meaning gradually shared by the children, and created inclusive, embodied, enacted, cumulative experiences of shared values. This research is significant because it details an ethical-socioepistemic-ontological-community building practice across time in an elementary classroom and shows how such a practice anchors classroom conditions where the dialogic values of attentive listening, taking student ideas seriously and engaging with multiple perspectives underpin the talk practices of literacy teaching and learning.