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Find out how you can analyze your classroom library for diversity and increase student access to books that matter to them and for them.

We dedicate this article to our good friend and colleague, Jennifer Wilson, a person with whom we loved to think and laugh and write. Through an act of violence, her life was taken away from us on August 28th, 2011. This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities.As colleagues engaged in critical pedagogy and critical literacy, we have puzzled together about practices that best support learners of all ages in understanding how structures of power, privilege, and oppression are socially constructed and how those structures could be deconstructed and transformed. Examining transcripts from our own classrooms and research sites, we recognized the central role of dialogue in this critical work. We saw, across these transcripts, how participants were engaged in what we came to call "critical dialogue"-identifying, challenging, and reframing status quo discourses that can then be acted upon in new ways that challenge oppression and open opportunities for transformation (Jennings, Jewett, Laman, Souto-Manning,

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