Dialog Journals in the Secondary Classroom: Promoting Growth, Resilience, and Storytelling

As a novice teacher, I often journaled about my experiences with the complexities and nuances of teaching pedagogy, administrative conflicts, failure to fit it, and difficulty with student engagement. My writing served as an anchor as I continued to develop, learn, and teach in my own classroom. After my first year in the classroom, I was not sure if I would return due to political and bureaucratic complaints that I had formed over a year working full time in the education system. I felt voiceless, as if my identity as an educator was being erased. When I made the transition to public school in my second year as an English Language Development teacher, I struggled with the same voicelessness I had at the beginning of my career. So, I flipped everything I knew about teaching and engagement and tossed the lesson plan out of the window and shared power with my students. The process of writing and actively engaging with lived experience was something I began to teach my own students and to instill in them as they became advocates and storytellers of their own. This is their story.