The inedito viavel (untested feasibility) of practitioner imaginations: Reflections on the challenges and possibilities of dialogic praxis for equity and widening participation

Drawing on Freirean notions of praxis, employing Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional framework of social justice, and implementing Burke’s Pedagogical Methodology, this practitioner-developed paper investigates the dynamics of a critical and reflexive approach to re-imagining university outreach and classroom teaching practices. This introspective work acknowledges the ethically fraught terrain of equity and widening participation outreach. It resists positioning stakeholders of practice as research participants, instead folding the research gaze back onto the practitioner-authors and their ‘unfinishedness’. Dialogic relation, critical reflection, and then interrogation of recorded versions of these relations and reflections, are the main methods of enquiry as we extensively contextualise and interrogate our practices. The dynamics producing and/or limiting the possibility of praxis that emerge include enabling and disabling power relations, resistance of hegemonic time structures, and co-developing dispositions of critical hope and unfinishedness to sustain provocation of the practitioner imagination. We carefully advocate for developing a generative instability; a contextually aware set of practices and meta-practices; a praxis that is continually and explicitly (re)situated in open, social, messy programmatic contexts.