Abstract

This paper describes my PhD research that explores how youth from one low-income Cape Town, South African neighbourhood learn through dialogue in three different places. These places include 1) a school, 2) a group of young hip-hop artists writing lyrics and participating in community development work with a local NGO and 3) a youth radio show involving young people from the same school and community. Dialogic learning is theorised as taking place through multiple perspectives being held together in tension with one another. Analysing young people learning through dialogue therefore involves looking at the ways in which youth use forms of language to participate in dialogues, grapple with the perspectives of others, reflect on their own positions and develop their ‘utterances’ through mechanisms such as “double-voicedness”. I analyse whether young people are afforded opportunities to integrate new concepts into their developing consciousness, in the different places researched in this project, documenting their attempts to integrate the ‘words of others’ into their personal conceptual and communicative repertoires.