Dialogic Learning as a Lever for Equity: Teacher Strategies in Indonesian Low-SES Classrooms

Abstract

This study investigates how dialogic pedagogy could potentially serve as a lever for equity in elementary classrooms in Indonesia with low socioeconomic status. Addressing concerns that inclusive education is often reduced to participation or classroom management, the study examines how inclusion is enacted, negotiated, and contested through everyday classroom dialogue. Drawing on a six-month ethnographic qualitative design, data were generated through prolonged classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with six teachers and twenty-one students, and detailed field notes. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted to interpret interactional practices within their social and institutional contexts.

The findings identify five interrelated pedagogical strategies: dialogic learning, building personal closeness, providing personal guidance, confirming student understanding, and offering appreciation and rewards. Dialogic learning emerged as the central practice through which students’ contributions reshaped the trajectory of classroom activity, enabling moments of co-authorship, epistemic uncertainty, and ethical recognition. In these dialogic encounters, students were positioned not merely as participants but as co-authors of meaning whose lived experiences and disagreements reoriented collective inquiry. At the same time, the study reveals tensions in which some inclusive practices, particularly reward-based participation, constrained dialogic openness by reasserting evaluative authority.

The study concludes that dialogic pedagogy functions not as a technical method but as an ethical and political practice through which equity is continually negotiated. It contributes to the scholarship on dialogic pedagogy by offering a context-sensitive analysis of how dialogic events emerge, fracture, and coexist with institutional demands in under-resourced classrooms.