Promoting dialogue about current issues in the media in secondary English classrooms: a view from Australia

As young people engage with the media landscape around them, they encounter a deterioration in public discourse relating to contemporary social, political and cultural issues. To address this breakdown, and to help their students become critical and informed citizens, English teachers are utilising classroom dialogue. The aim of our study was to understand how secondary English teachers in Victoria, Australia, promote dialogue in their classrooms about current issues in the media in the course of their teaching. The study’s findings suggest that English teachers who promote classroom dialogue about current issues in the media have a socially and democratically empowering vision of their work. The findings also point to the ways that teachers facilitate a dialogic space and navigate the challenges with conversations about difficult and controversial issues. The study demonstrates the unique and powerful democratic and ethical work teachers perform in spite of neoliberal attempts to narrow and de-politicise the scope and nature of their work.