How Spanish speakers encourage dialogue in participatory occupational health training

The More than Training project (Forst, PI) has the goal of offering construction safety training in the Spanish language to immigrant participants of workers' centers using a popular education approach that focuses on worker trainers offering interactive activities to participants for group discussion and problem posing. In year one and two we reached 179 participants who received OSHA 10 Hour Construction Training cards through our efforts. In the process of observing the sessions, I realized that there is much variety in the origin of their Spanish. Here the workers teach as leaders and promote discussion and interactive learning in dialogue with their peers and an expert. My methods of inquiry will be to interview trainers, organizers, and research partners who are bilingual Spanish/English speakers about their Spanish language origins, and their use of Spanish in the training sessions. I will ask them about their awareness of Spanish language varieties, English use, and how the differences were noticed and responded to in the sessions (Alim, 2005; Hurtig, 2008; Philips, 2004). I am particularly interested in how the dialogue or discussion may have been impacted. Through constant comparison thematic analysis of the interviews I hope to gain understanding about how language and power are displayed in the sessions and how awareness and use of language varieties impact the discourse and agency of the actors (Pascale, 2008; Street, 1995). One outcome is to describe how Spanish speakers encourage dialogue in participatory learning sessions. Ethical review approved for UIC IRB Protocol number 2010-0445.