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Article published In:
When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 110–129

Unspoken assumptions, deep holes and boundless expectations

The dialogical tensions in teaching short stories

| York University Toronto

This study examines the different institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical factors that come into play when teaching literary works with the goal of fostering dialogue, understood in the sense of civic communication and tolerance. Drawing on an Action Research approach, the analysis probes a specific experience teaching the diverse English-language short story tradition in the Canadian and German university context. The results show that to maximize the potential of teaching literary works for nurturing dialogue, instructors must navigate among multiple and at times contradictory forces reflecting institutional and disciplinary teaching priorities, divergent conceptualisations of dialogue, theoretical incongruities, varied literary and critical traditions, and complex mediation techniques.

Keywords: dialogue, teaching literature, course design, literary theory, mediation, Action Research
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Looking inward: Is there a beginning to dialogue?
  • 3.Unspoken assumptions: Dialogue’s shifting terrain
  • 4.Confronting the method: Mining the deep holes
  • 5.Tending the tensions: Dialogue, mediation and connectivity
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00114.whi
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