Dialogue:
The English Language School
of the People

the skinny -

the scroll for the deep dive -

Who

Dialogue is built for anyone with a secondary school diploma or its equivalent anywhere.

This includes refugees and asylum seekers building English in countries new to them; immigrants whose professional credentials wait on English certification — physicians, engineers, attorneys, nurses, teachers, accountants, social workers — whose existing expertise is held in suspension until their English is judged sufficient; undocumented residents whose access to formal English programs has often required documentation they could not or would not produce; mobile professionals whose work crosses multiple language environments; and parents in bilingual households who want fluency strong enough to support their children's schooling.

These populations are real, they are large, and they are largely unmet.

They are not, however, the first adults to have learned English under intensive conditions. Across four centuries of American colonialism, slavery, residential schooling, forced acquisition, and even free college-based programs, individuals were taught English under coercion. The historical record shows that many refused the terms of their learning even as they learned. Across the Atlantic, Shakespeare echoed their reality with his imagination, in his character Caliban, the slave whom his Prospero taught English in order to make him a more effective slave, but the masterful learner who used what he learned to refuse Prospero's authority over his speech. Nearly 50 years ago, the American linguist H. G. Widdowson, in a 1980 plenary address to the international TESOL convention, named Caliban as the figure through whom the English-language teaching profession should understand who actually owns the language. Dialogue is a school of, by, and for real twenty-first century Calibans of the world.

Why "of the People"

The school's name carries a deliberate echo. The English Language School of the People uses a construction with a long history in English political and religious thought, made famous in eventual abolitionist Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: of, by, and for — applied at Dialogue to learners.

That construction names a governance commitment. The school exists to serve its learners; its learners hire its educators; its donors fund only what learners hire. Each of those parties exists in support of the learners. Some day each of these parties may all be Dialogue learners or alumni.

The initial Board of Directors, who guide the school into its establishment, hold the corporation in trust for the learners who will, upon enrollment, form the school's governance themselves — a commitment Dialogue calls learnerocracy. Learnerocracy means that, over time, alumni serve as instructors, leaders, and board members — governing the institution they were once served by.

The Board meets quarterly. Its four founding members — Lizdelia Piñón, President; Carlo Capua, Vice President; Tracy Rundstrom, Treasurer; and Kurk Gayle, Secretary — are all lifelong language learners. All hold graduate degrees they use professionally. All reside in the school's headquarter city of Fort Worth, Texas. None of them, including the founder, intends to govern the school permanently. 

When and where

Dialogue was incorporated as a Texas nonprofit corporation on December 3, 2025, and recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) public charity on the same date. Bylaws were adopted January 5, 2026. The first instructional cohort begins September 3, 2026.

The school is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Its learners are anywhere.

Founder

Kurk Gayle was born in Fort Worth but was taken as a baby to a war zone, where he grew up bilingual, his parents at times fleeing the country where they lived because of military conflict. He spent his adolescence in a nation nearby, studying a new language, after his family was initially denied a visa to cross its border to live there. The displacement from home, the denial of the visa, were for this young person concrete instruments of exclusion before they became respective barriers this school refuses on behalf of others.

His adult life has been a confrontation of the barriers through his further study of the world's lingua franca and three higher education degrees at various institutions.

He founded Dialogue after decades of work in Intensive English Programs at four universities in the US (two public, two private), after creating the world's first fully online asynchronous US university IEP that quadrupled students' TOEFL scores, after founding the world's first tuition-free doubly-accredited six-university IEP, and after six years of teaching students in public schools full time while also teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

He serves as Dialogue's secretary, for its first Board of Directors. The school's permanent governance, learnerocracy, will not include him.