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Abstract

Education, as a field, is inherently political, ideological, and contextual (Freire, 1970). As a result, there are no easy answers to address the myriad of highly contestable educational issues that arise as part of the daily classroom discourse. Educators can find themselves at a los for words when it comes to providing clear cut answers given the number of highly polarizing stances, comments, and opinions that elicit strong student and teacher responses. Yet, in the context of the classroom space, the teacher holds a lot of power, which must be coupled with an ethical responsiveness to student engagement, participation, and development of "small talk" in an education course as an approach to co-constructing a dialogic classroom community in which everyone has a responsibility to answerability.

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