“Dialogue is, thus, an existential necessity.” Paulo Freire

Abstract

Institutions of education are spaces in which broader issues show up and replicate themselves; they are also spaces where intentional deliberation transforms not only schools, but the communities in which schools are embedded. Many factors contribute to the messy reality of education and many remedies are necessary for schools to fulfill their liberatory potential. In this journal, we cultivate space for one of the most powerful tools for educational transformation: dialogue/diálogo. K-16 educational partners are constantly negotiating social forces and caught amidst school’s dual aims of inculcation and liberation. Yet, much of the discourse regarding issues of justice and equity in education happens in silos. This journal upends that practice and, instead, cultivates an authentic dialogue towards a tranforming of our realities amongst myriad people invested in education, including pre-service and in-service teachers and administrators, school counselors, staff, community members, faculty, and researchers.

Our intentions for In Dialogue/En Diálago are to put K-16 educational partners in conversation with each other about critical issues in education, and to cultivate collective critical consciousness amongst educators in the greater Los Angeles region.  Fostering community dialogue is integral to the process of advocating for more just schooling. As such, we feature voices not typically included in traditional academic journals but that are essential in the discourse toward equity and justice. In this editors dialogue, we offer some insight into how each piece in this inagural issue is critical to our community dialogue, in this case, about our transformed realities due to the global pandemic we all experienced.