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A Few Words About Bibler's Dialogics: The School of the Dialogue of Cultures Conception and Curriculum
... We argue that our notion of Dialogic Education For and From Authorial Agency (DEFFAA) -i.e., education focusing on promoting the student's authorial agency in a critical dialogue as the main purpose of the teaching and learning practice, -is incompatible with having preset curricular endpoints (Taubman, 2009). The very notion of authorial agency 6 cannot be preset because it is inherently based on goal-and problem-defining processes 7 , creativity, unpredictability , education-for-an-unknown-future, production of culture 8 (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009), novelty, surprise by the self and the others (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009;Matusov, 2009Matusov, , 2011cMiyazaki, 2007, July), freedom and legitimacy for non-participation (Greenberg, 1992;Neill, 1960), learning on-demand of the ongoing activities (rather than on-demand of the teacher or 5 Alternatively, a technological approach may unwillingly create oases of agency-based education in conventional teaching. More research is needed. ...
... We argue that our notion of Dialogic Education For and From Authorial Agency (DEFFAA) -i.e., education focusing on promoting the student's authorial agency in a critical dialogue as the main purpose of the teaching and learning practice, -is incompatible with having preset curricular endpoints (Taubman, 2009). The very notion of authorial agency 6 cannot be preset because it is inherently based on goal-and problem-defining processes 7 , creativity, unpredictability , education-for-an-unknown-future, production of culture 8 (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009), novelty, surprise by the self and the others (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009;Matusov, 2009Matusov, , 2011cMiyazaki, 2007, July), freedom and legitimacy for non-participation (Greenberg, 1992;Neill, 1960), learning on-demand of the ongoing activities (rather than on-demand of the teacher or 5 Alternatively, a technological approach may unwillingly create oases of agency-based education in conventional teaching. More research is needed. ...
... 6. This transcendence and its recognition occur on a big, highly visible, scale that often requires special actions (i.e., the actions that are often referred as "self-actualization", see Maslow, 1943) as well as on a small, rather unnoticeable scale which penetrates even people's everyday routines and basic needs (Matusov, A170 2011a); 7. The existing, ready-made, given culture provides the material for the person's transcendence of the practice and recognition of this transcendence by self and others (Buchanan, 1979); 8. Authorial agency exists and reveals itself through a person's acts of culture transformation 10 , culture making, and culture production (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009;; 9. Disagreement, mis-and non-understanding, non-participation, non-cooperation, and collision of participants' desires are birthmarks of authorial agency (Matusov, 1996(Matusov, , 2001(Matusov, , 2011c; ...
In this paper, we extend Bakhtin's ethical philosophical ideas to education and introduce a dialogic authorial agency espoused approach. We then consider this approach in opposition to the mainstream technological espoused approach, while focusing our contrasting analysis on student’s authorial agency and critical dialogue. We argue that the technological approach assumes that the "skills" or "knowledge" are garnered in pursuit of preset curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards). Since the goals of the technological approach are divorced from the students’ personal goals, values, and interests, they are incompatible and irreconcilable with what we idealize as the true goal of education, education for agency.
The authorial agency approach to education (Dialogic Education For and From Authorial Agency) emphasizes the unpredictable, improvisational, eventful, dialogic, personal, relational, transcending, and ontological nature of education. The authorial agency of the student and of the teacher are valued and recognized by all participants as the primary goal of education – supported by the school system and broader society. The approach defines education as a learner’s leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, the life, and the world in critical dialogue. The purpose of authorial agency pedagogy is to facilitate this process by promoting students’ agency and unique critical voices in socially desired practices – critical voices, recognized by the students themselves and others relevant to the particular practice(s). Ultimately, in the authorial education for and from authorial agency, students are led into investigating and testing their ideas and desires, assuming new responsibilities and developing new questions and concerns.
Finally, we describe and analyze the first author’s partially successful and partially failing attempt to enact a dialogic authorial approach. It will allow the reader to both visualize and problematize a dialogic authorial approach. We will consider a case with a rich “e-paper trail” written by 11 undergraduate, pre-service teacher education students (mostly sophomores), and the instructor (Peter, the first author, pseudonym) in a course on cultural diversity. The case focuses on the university students (future teachers) and their professor discussing several occasions that involved interactions between Peter and one minority child in an afterschool center. Our research questions in this empirical study were aimed at determining the successes, challenges, and failures of the dialogic authorial pedagogical approach and conditions for them
... Simply by learning, people do not constitute an ontological community of learners because learning is an aspect and a byproduct of any human activity (Lave, 1992, April). Active intentional learners are characterized, at least, by two related and necessary aspects: 1) being puzzled and perplexed by something (Aristotle & Apostle, 1966;Plato, 1997), having "a point of wonder" (Berlyand, 2009), raising an authentic question that seeks for information, and recognizing his or her own ignorance (see the concept of "learned ignorance" in Nicholas, 1954); and 2) the person's desire to address him or herself to, other people, and the inquiry itself (rather than to suppress it or just leave it unaddressed). Thus, the best evidence of a person becoming a learner is the person asking a genuine, information-seeking, question. ...
... In an ontological CoL project, the teacher does not wait passively for a puzzling perplexity to spontaneously emerge in students, but actively designs situations that set up conditions for emergence of the student's inquiry to be likely to spontaneously occur for these particular students in this particular academic curriculum. In preparation for a lesson, the teacher in an ontological CoL approach to instruction focuses on developing "dialogical provocations" (Matusov, 2009), "contradictions" (Davydov, 1998 ;Miyazaki, 2007, July), or "points of wonder" (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009;Koshmanova, 2006) for the students (and the teacher). This approach is in contrast to what is proposed in an instructional instrumental approach to CoL; in this latter approach, the teacher searches for the curricular "big ideas" (Shulman & Sherin, 2004) that can be divided into "'researchable' and 'jigsaw-able' chunks" for the students' groupwork (Mintrop, 2004) or can be garnered from the teacher's "leading questions" (A. ...
... In narrowly dialogic ontological CoL, the students seem to appreciate dialogic learning from their own puzzling perplexities promoted by teacher's design of dialogic provocations and journeys organized as teacher-initiated assignments. But at the same time, we hypothesize that the students might feel oppressed by these assignments that rob them of their agency for their own work (Holt, 1972), self-determination (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009), self-actualization (Maslow, 1943), and prevent them from the authorship of their own dialogic provocations and journeys -the phenomenon described as "[conventional] school toxification" (see, Greenberg, 1992;Llewellyn, 1998;Neill, 1960). The dialogically narrow CoL class is organized not around the students' learning initiatives (self-assignments) but around the teacher's assignments, however good or useful these assignments might be. ...
Our analysis reveals two major types of "Community of Learners" (COL) projects in education: instrumental and ontological. In instrumental COL, the notion of "community" is separated from the notion of "instruction" in order to reach some preset endpoints: curricular or otherwise. We notice three main instrumental COL models: relational, instructional, and engagement. Ontological COL redefines learning as an ill-defined, distributed, social, multi-faceted, poly-goal, agency-based, and situated process that integrates all educational aspects. We will consider two ontological COL projects into: narrowly dialogic and polyphonic.
... Collaboration and genuine dialogue the students about their learning heavily depends on the teacher's curricular improvisation and flexibility rooted in the teacher's personal interest in, commitment in, and even excitement of the taught curricular (Sawyer 2004). Following Bibler's concept of Bperson of culture^-a person who actively contributes to production of culture (Berlyand 2009;Bibler 2009), − Lobok (2014 insists that a good teacher has to be a Bperson of culture^meaning that the teacher has to be an epistemological learner of the taught curriculum, constantly learning and being interested in the curriculum (Matusov 2009, chapter 4;Miyazaki 2007, July). When the teacher does not expect to be a person of culture and does not expect to be interested, invested, and excited about the taught curriculum, he or she is not ready for improvisation with the students and collaboration with them. ...
... I hope at these learning experiences around teachable moments can provide my students with pathway to eventful dialogic teaching and becoming Ba person of culture.^This requires a philosophical shift from defining education as Breproduction of culture^ (Bourdieu 1977) to defining education as Bproduction of culture^: education as culture making (Berlyand 2009;Bibler 2009). ...
This opportunistic case-study highlights striking differences in 6 urban children’s and 12 preservice suburban middle-class teachers’ perception of science and discuss consequences of science education and beyond. I found that all of the interviewed urban children demonstrated scientific inquiries and interests outside of the school science education that can be characterized by diverse simultaneous discourses from diverse practices, i.e., “heterodiscoursia” (Matusov in Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99–119, 2011b), despite their diverse, positive and negative, attitudes toward school science. In contrast to the urban children’s mixed attitudes to science, the preservice teachers view science negatively. They could not see science inquiries in the videotaped interviews of the urban children. There seemed to be many reasons for that. One of the possible reasons for that was that the preservice teachers tried to purify the science practice. Another reason was that they did not see a necessity to be interested and engaged in the curriculum that they are going to teach in future. The pedagogical consequences and remedies are discussed.
... It is interested in the mundane only because it can give the material and opportunity to move to the sublime (see Phillips, 2002, as a good example). The non-instrumental epistemological dialogue is a purified dialogue to abstract a single main theme, a development of a main concept, and unfolding the logic -interested in purification of a dialogue into dia-logics (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009). Due to this purification, epistemological dialogue occurs in de-ontologized intellectual space and time. ...
... Fifth, epistemological non-instrumental dialogue does not know interest in ontological ecologyonly in the universal logical necessity (which can be multiple, according to Bibler, another proponent of the non-instrumental epistemological dialogic pedagogy, see Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009). In contrast to the spirituality of the sublime, emphasized by the non-instrumental epistemological dialogue, the ontological ecology -the corporality of the mundane -is essentially non-dialogic but it can be pulled in a sphere of ontological dialogicity. ...
In September 2011 in Rome at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research conference, Eugene Matusov (USA), Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan), Jayne White (New Zealand), and Olga Dysthe (Norway) organized a symposium on Dialogic Pedagogy. Formally during the symposium and informally after the symposium several heated discussions started among the participants about the nature of dialogic pedagogy. The uniting theme of these discussions was a strong commitment by all four participants to apply the dialogic framework developed by Soviet-Russian philosopher and literary theoretician Bakhtin to education. In this special issue, Eugene Matusov (USA) and Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan) have developed only three of the heated issues discussed at the symposium in a form of dialogic exchanges (dialogue-disagreements). We invited our Dialogic Pedagogy colleagues Jayne White (New Zealand) and Olga Dysthe (Norway) to write commentaries on the dialogues. Fortunately, Jayne White kindly accepted the request and wrote her commentary. Unfortunately, Olga Dysthe could not participate due to her prior commitments to other projects. We also invited Ana Marjanovic-Shane (USA), Beth Ferholt (USA), Rupert Wegerif (UK), and Paul Sullivan (UK) to comment on Eugene-Kiyotaka dialogue-disagreement. The first two heated issues were initiated by Eugene Matusov by providing a typology of different conceptual approaches to Dialogic Pedagogy that he had noticed in education. Specifically, the debate with Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and the other two participants) was around three types of Dialogic Pedagogy defined by Eugene Matusov: instrumental, epistemological, and ontological types of Dialogic Pedagogy. Specifically, Eugene Matusov subscribes to ontological dialogic pedagogy arguing that dialogic pedagogy should be built around students’ important existing or emergent life interests, concerns, questions, and needs. He challenged both instrumental dialogic pedagogy that is mostly interested in using dialogic interactional format of instruction to make students effectively arrive at preset curricular endpoints and epistemological dialogic pedagogy that is most interested in production of new knowledge for students. Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and other participants) found this typology not to be useful and challenged the values behind it. Kiyotaka Miyazaki introduced the third heated topic of treating students as “heroes” of the teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy similar to Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel based on Bakhtin’s analysis. Eugene Matusov took issue with treating students as “heroes” of teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy arguing that in Dialogic Pedagogy students author their own education and their own becoming. Originally, we wanted to present our Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy in the following format. An initiator of a heated topic develops his argument, the opponent provides a counter-argument, and then the initiator has an opportunity to reply with his “final word” (of course, we know that there is no “final word” in a dialogue). However, after Eugene Matusov developed two of his heated topics, Kiyotaka Miyazaki wanted to reply to both of them in one unified response, rather than two separate replies. Jayne White, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Beth Ferholt, and Paul Sullivan wrote commentaries about the entire exchange and these commentaries should be treated as part of our Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy. We hope that readers, interested in Dialogic Pedagogy, will join our heated Dialogue-Disagreement and will introduce more heated topics.
... The notion of dialoguedisagreement was coined by Sergey Kurganov (2009), one of the founders of Ochag and the School of Dialogue of Cultures. It is based on the philosophical ideas of the Soviet philosopher Vladimir Bibler (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 1988Bibler, , 1993Bibler, , 2009, who was influenced by the Soviet philosopher of dialogism Mikhail Bakhtin (Bibler, 1991). ...
This essay represents the publication of my keynote address at the First DPJ online conference on December 12, 2022. In my speech, I defined how I perceive “our times” and how Dialogic Pedagogy in our times of peace and war may try to address these challenges or even if we should do so. I continued developing the concept of Ontological Dialogic Education. What is the role of Ontological Dialogic Education in addressing the challenges of our times, and is it relevant at all? Why and how can it contribute to a vision of a liberal democracy, if at all? This questioning let me introduce a key post-Enlightenment notion of education based on students’ self-determination and dignity.
... The goal of progressive education is the same as the goal of conventional education: the students should arrive at the known truths and values agreed upon by the already rational people, who are the experts and, thus, authorities in their respective domains of knowledge. The students may test their ideas, but not with full freedom: the caveat is that they must arrive at an agreement with the known truths prescribed by the curriculum, educational authorities, and experts -and, ultimately, they can then join The Big Dialogue of Cultures (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009), i.e., become "educated." Thus, in progressive schools, the dominant type of discourse still remains an authoritarian, magisterial discourse (Bakhtin, 1991). ...
The introduction to this special issue has the particular purpose of presenting the philosophical and educational approach of democratic schooling and its practices to readers interested and knowledgeable in Dialogic Pedagogy but without enough information about Democratic education. Namely, many scholars of dialogic pedagogy are not very familiar with democratic schooling, if at all. The term “democratic education” is polysemic (Matusov, 2023), and many educationalists use it to refer to civic education in conventional schools. However, in this special issue, we explore the relationships between dialogic pedagogy and democratically run schools. In the article, I describe democratic education and its current spread and scarcity worldwide. Next, I examine the meaning and the uses of Dialogue in conventional and progressive education. Finally, I introduce the questions about the meaning and values of dialogic pedagogy in democratic education that guided us in putting together this Special Issue.
... At least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. Without a genuine question or at least puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, or tension, a student cannot be involved in a meaning-making process (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009) -and therefore cannot be involved in education. Provoking such types of questions in students is proto-teaching, preparation for teaching. ...
From a conventional monological view, meaning-making is located in a particular statement. In conventional schools, students are positioned to be enactors of ready-made knowledge and skills on teacher’s demand based on their pattern-recognition and production, rather than to be authors of their own education, learning, knowledge, and meaning. Pattern recognition involves the emergence of active production of diverse potential patterns that may or may not approximate well the targeted pattern (“sprouting”). The sprouting can be guided (“supervised”) by an expert or unguided, mediated or unmediated. These diverse potential patterns are sequentially evaluated about how likely each of them can be close to the targeted pattern. In each evaluation, the probabilistic confidence of some patterns grows while some other patterns decrease. In contrast, according to Bakhtin, meaning-making is defined as the relationship between a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question and serious response to it. From the Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, a statement does not have any meaning until it is viewed as a reply to some question in an internally persuasive discourse. A student’s meaning-making process starts with a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question raised by the student. At least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. Another aspect of dialogic meaning-making is interaddressivity. A student is interested in other people: 1) in what other people may think and how they feel about it; however these people define this it, and 2) in other people as such – in what they are doing, feeling, relating, and thinking about; in the relationship with these people; in the potential that these people may realize and offer; and so on.
... Intrinsic education is not about reproduc tion of a ready-made culture in a new generation as conventional and even some innovative schooling assumes. Rather, intrinsic education is about production of a new culture, culture-making, on small or large scales (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009). A production of a new culture can occur through either learners' creative authorship or critical reflective authorship. ...
... Intrinsic education is not about reproduction of a ready-made culture in a new generation as conventional and even some innovative schooling assumes. Rather, intrinsic education is about production of a new culture, culture-making, on small or large scales (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009). A production of a new culture can occur through either learners' creative authorship or critical reflective authorship. ...
... In contrast, dialogic authorial education is pro-creativity. It defi nes education as culture-making, production of culture, and transcendence of the given (Berlyand 2009 ;Bibler 2009 ). Creativity is viewed as the basis of education; it is encouraged in students and teachers rather than postponed. ...
We argue that conventional conceptual frameworks to creativity do not fit the phenomenon because they view creativity as the given. To address this problem, we present our attempt to develop a dialogic authorial approach to creativity in education. In contrast to most existing monologic approaches to creativity known to us, we consider four dialogic aspects of creativity: (a) the addressive—as an act of addressing and responding to somebody in an ongoing dialogue; (b) the existential—dialogic recognition of someone’s act as creative; (c) the axiological—dialogic evaluation of creativity as good or bad, moral or immoral, and so on; and (d) the cultural (meta-axiological)—dialogic valuing innovation over tradition preservation or vice versa. In our chapter, we develop our theoretical approach as we describe and ethnographically analyze an educational event involving Latino/a children doing disengaged homework in an afterschool program, and discuss its pedagogical implications.
... Similarly, a Soviet philosopher Bibler defined ''a person of culture,'' someone who actively and constantly authors the culture. Bibler saw the goal of education in promoting ''a person of culture'' 4 -an active and self-conscious culture-maker (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009). Here, the culture is defined by its authorship. ...
In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: “culture as pattern,” “culture as boundary,” “culture as authorship,” and “culture as critical dialog.” In the “culture as pattern,” education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the “culture as boundary,” encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The “culture as authorship” is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. “Culture as critical dialog” promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Education aims at the critical examination of the self, life, world, and society. Student is welcomed as an ultimate spoilsport, a devil’s advocate. In conclusion, we discuss complex relationships among the four gestalt approaches to culture and education and the ontology of these gestalt approaches. As a by-product of our analysis, we critically deconstruct the concept of meaning making as deeply dialogic process, separating it from its many masks that are mistakenly identified with it.
... The authorial teaching is based on the teacher's recognition of and capitalizing on emergent teaching-learning moments with the students (see my examples above). This is possible only when the teacher him or herself is an active author of the culture, "a person of culture" (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009;Lobok, 2001;Miyazaki, 2007), which means that the teacher enthusiastically and seriously works on diverse curricular subjects as an active learner, scholar, and practitioner and "thinks aloud" with his or her students during the lesson. However, the voice of the teacher in the classroom is not of the Objective Expert #1 (i.e., the person-less voice of the truth) but of a subjective and interested epistemological learner among other fellow learners i.e., his or her own students (and colleagues). ...
... Simply by learning, people do not constitute an ontological community of learners because learning is an aspect and a byproduct of any human activity (Lave, 1992, April). Active intentional learners are characterized by two related and necessary aspects: 1) being puzzled and perplexed by something (Plato, 1997), having ‗a point of wonder' (Berlyand, 1996(Berlyand, , 2009aKurganov, 1989), raising an authentic question that seeks for information, and recognizing his or her own ignorance (see the concept of 'learned ignorance ' in Nicholas, 1954); and 2) the person's desire to address him or herself, other people, and the inquiry itself (rather than to suppress it or just leave it unaddressed). The best evidence of a person becoming a learner is the person asking a genuine, information-seeking, question (Matusov, von Duyke, et al., 2012, submitted;see also, Phillips, 2002). ...
This book analyzes a unique pedagogical experiment in Higher Education to explore innovative ways to teach a graduate seminar guided by Dialogic Pedagogy. There have been many books describing successful pedagogical innovations in higher education and beyond. In contrast, this book describes a certain type of pedagogical failure of the innovation that is arguably common in practice but rarely reported. This pedagogical failure is called a "Centauric Failure". Like the Centaur, who embodied two contrasting natures of half-human and half-beast, this pedagogical experiment was guided by humanistic and dialogic values, but also it caused pains to the participants. The in-depth analysis of events has pushed the boundaries of Dialogic Pedagogy based on the framework developed by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin toward the notion of agency in education.
... The SDC might provide a model for how to traverse the "gap" between theory and practice that more and more of us want to cross. Berlyand (2009) describes how, according to the SDC, education provides a crucial test for philosophy. Philosophy explores the origins or foundations of knowledge and other basic human capacities. ...
This commentary engages with essentially contestable questions raised by the School of the Dialogue of Cultures. It focuses on questions about how theory should relate to practice and how a "dialogic" approach can involve students in simultaneously rigorous and relevant academic discussions.
... My natural sympathy with SDC thinking-and of course the reader must be warned that these are only the faltering first steps toward a genuine understandingmight be explained by my own work as a teacher educator, and the neo-Heideggerian appropriations I am making toward a philosophy of education. 1 For in Heidegger's philosophy I sense a similar (though different) deconstructive force-here one that accounts for the vicissitudes of western philosophy in terms of human understanding and ways with being which might be compared to Bibler's types of reason (Berlyand, 2009;Bibler, 2009)-as well as a constructive force or recovery for an authentic way with human being. For the later Heidegger, such a way is needed in order to counteract what he saw as our present-day reductive obsessions with optimization and a resource mentality that together characterize for him the nihilistic destitution of our times. ...
The article identifies some key philosophical themes, important to a Heideggerian appropriation of a philosophy of education, that promisingly resonate or contrast with certain key philosophical themes in the movement that calls itself the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC). It is argued that an existential view of education, involving attunement by beings aware of their own historicality, points to a fruitful future dialogue between this approach and a view celebrating authentic dialogue.
... His poly-consciousness approach, in which 'selfhood is not a particular voice within, but a particular way of combining many voices within' (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 221), guides educators to design possibilities for interaddressivity and interproblematicity in the classroom. This means that any curriculum has to be dialogic -i.e., problematic for both the teacher and the students (Berlyand, 2009a;Matusov, 2009). The participants' orientation of dialogic interaddressivity -expecting that each participant contributes something new, interesting, and important -is necessary in dialogic pedagogy for deep learning as well as the participants' ontological engagement in the joint problem. ...
In Western psychology and education, up until very recently, Bakhtin has often been introduced as a scholar whose approach was compatible with and an extension of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. I argue that this continuity is problematic. Vygotsky’s approach to the social was heavily influenced by Hegel’s universalist, mono-logic, mono-logical, developmental (diachronic), activity-based philosophy. Bakhtin developed a pluralistic, essentially synchronic, dialogic, discourse- and genre-based approach to the social, involving the hybridity of co-existing competing and conflicting varieties of logic. Extrapolating Bakhtin’s approach in education and psychology, I argue that from Bakhtin’s dialogic framework, when a child (or any other person) is a subject of development — as in developmental psychology, or a subject of learning — as in education, development, its goals, and developmental values defining the teleology of the development, become (again) unknown for the participant (e.g., a developmental psychologist or parent).
Vocational education aims to enhance students' vocational knowledge development. However, which pedagogies enhance such development is not self-evident. This article therefore explores vocational knowledge development during vocational conversations between teachers and students. Vocational knowledge development is viewed here from a cultural-historical stance, referring to its situated and social nature. The study is conducted in senior secondary vocational education in the Netherlands, in the domain of Sport Instruction. Four types of vocational conversations were identified, namely: performance-oriented conversations, concept-informed conversations, problem-based conversations and professional identity conversations. The conversations differ in their meaning, nature and context. Meaning refers to the vocational content of the conversations, nature to the way the conversations are regulated and context to characteristics of the learning environment and practical circumstances. Performance-oriented conversations and problem-based conversations were most frequently observed. Implications of these results are discussed from the perspective of teachers in their role as significant other. Contactpersoon Harmen Schaap, harmen.schaap@ru.nl Copyright © Author(s); licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. This allows for unrestricted use, as long as the author(s) and source are credited. Financiering onderzoek-Belangen De auteurs hebben geen belangen te vermelden.
In this chapter, I will discuss diverse forms of fake and genuine leisure. Genuine leisure involves the realization of people’s existential needs for self-actualization, self-fulfillment, self-realization, and self-transcendence. Authentic leisure requires people’s unconditional well-being and an unconditional safety net, resources for their creativity, a social environment of people with similar and dissimilar leisurely interests, good health, and education promoting people’s authorship. It takes diverse forms like play, intrinsic education, passionate endeavors, and hanging out with friends. Genuine leisure requires different societal, cultural values, and a different organization of the society (e.g., economy, politics).
I describe, analyze, and critique modern mainstream institutionalized education with its hegemony of instrumental technological education that suppresses and disvalues intrinsic education. I argue that this instrumental, technological, education is mostly based on pattern recognition and pattern production (mediated or unmediated) rather than on meaning-making. This form of education makes learned knowledge mostly conventional (like language patterns) rather than conceptual. I criticize conventional instrumental education for its systematic creation of alienation of students from their education, authorial agency, and life itself. I also discuss a necessities-based society that generates and supports this type of education that focuses on producing humans acting as smart machines.
All Bakhtinian teaching cases reported by the self-inspired Bakhtinian educators in our interviews with them were placed on an online discussion forum. In this chapter we present two of these teaching cases with their full online discussions. Case#11 (case numbers derive from the order in which they appeared on our discussion online forum—subsequently we started referring to these numbers in our analyses and further dialogues with our colleagues): Bakhtinian teaching as unfinalized dialogues between the consciousnesses of equal minds, by Tara Ratnam, India, and Case#9: Bakhtinian teaching as a messy chatting on a subject matter, by Dmitri Nikulin, USA. Cases#11 and #9 were chosen for this chapter based on the richness and the diversity of their online discussions. Due to the lack of space, we could not present more cases with their full online discussion.
Modern conventional schools remain bastions of the feudal social and political relations based on highly hierarchical, nonnegotiable, authoritarianism, even in countries with liberal democracies as their political system (Sidorkin, Learning relations: Impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. New York, NY: P. Lang, 2002). The teacher–student power relations are hierarchical and authoritarian, where the school authorities define almost all aspects of education for the students. However, authoritarian power relations create an educational paradox: they create dogmatic thinking based on authority, instead of genuine education which requires students’ free and critical thinking, where the truth can be established in dialogue, by empirical evidence, argument, reasoning, logic, testing alternative ideas, observations, experiments. Nevertheless, rather than establishing power-free relationships, the Enlightenment thinkers and their followers have tried to ameliorate or to hide, but still keep, the power and control of the educational authority. The issue for many of the Bakhtinian educators, raised by the Enlightenment, is whether free-thinking can emerge from any limited or invisible or dying out authoritarianism or from a dialogue free of coercion as a social and political precursor of free thinking.
Educational Dilemmas uses cultural psychology to explore the challenges, contradictions and tensions that occur during the process of education, with consideration of the effect these have at both the individual and the collective level. It argues that the focus on issues in learning overlooks a fundamental characteristic of education: that the process of educating is simultaneously both constructive and disruptive. Drawing on research from Europe, America and Asia, chapters in this volume present and analyse different experiences of the tension between disruption and construction in the process of education. Situating educational discontent within the wider context, the book demonstrates how this issue can be exacerbated by the tension between the commodification and democratisation of educational systems. This book demonstrates that these issues permeate all levels of education and, as a result, emphasises how vital it is that educational discontent is considered from a new perspective. Educational Dilemmas is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychology and education. It should also be of great interest to school psychologists, teachers and therapists.
This special issue is dedicated to an innovative pedagogy by Soviet-Russian math educator Nikalai Nikolaevich Konstantinov. Diverse and at times contradictory interviews with Konstantinov, math teachers involved in his pedagogy, and former students, available sources in Russian and English, and my own memoirs as a former student of Konstantinov, I tried to reconstruct, define, analyze, evaluate, and problematize his innovative pedagogy. Konstantinov himself defined his innovative pedagogy as promoting “people with wings” – promoting initiative, creativity, ownership, critical thinking, and self-realization among students in math and other areas. In math instruction, Konstantinov focuses on providing students with choices of math problems, interrogating students’ math solutions, and offering guidance in a direct response to the questions and difficulties that the students experience in their particular math problems. I demonstrate his pedagogical approach is integrative aiming not only at math. Emerging tensions between students’ curricular choice and teacher’s imposition, educational elitism and social equality, and teacher’s authorial freedom and Konstantinov’s support are discussed.
A sound pedagogical framework must be explored and identified to implement opportunities for collaborative learning through international exchange. This paper identifies the framework used by two universities, in Sweden and the United States. Virtual learning environments and meaningful learning activities can be constructed using web-based learning platforms. The goal for this initiative was 'internationalisation on home plan' for nursing faculty and students that opened up internationalised learning opportunities for all students, including those who do not participate in study abroad/mobility activities. This broader opportunity supports the development of cultural awareness and understanding of global health care practices and the nursing profession on mutual topics of concern, in this case patient safety. Learning activities and learning outcomes can be stipulated. The pedagogical framework was compatible with the Bologna Process's constructive alignment, deep learning and a student focus. The student nurses were not only given the opportunity to explore the learning objective of patient safety and participate in an international collaboration with another university, but also gained university academic credit for the fulfilling the task. There is a great gain in using virtual collaboration and learning modules that are embedded in courses for the purpose of 'internationalisation on home plan' since not all students can participate in student mobility activities.
The present article gives an analysis of the theoretical and historical background of the School for the Dialogue of Cultures, taking into account the problems of dialectics and the teaching process. It is directly based on the traditions of Bakhtin and Bibler and considers school-society-person interconnections.
The comments compare the School of the Dialogue of Cultures and the Developmental Instruction approach and explore the historical context, epistemological framework, approaches to meaning making, and cultural tools of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures. The author poses theoretical and methodological questions regarding the approach.
This article responds to articles that offer the School of the Dialogue of Cultures pedagogical movement in Ukraine and Russia as an approach that will revolutionize schooling. In this response I question the degree to which the exclusive intellectual quality of the private school curriculum could be adapted to schools characterized by poverty and other factors that would mitigate against students' embrace of a classical education.
The author argues that the School of the Dialogue of Cultures has paid inadequate attention to the student and to what the student brings to "the dialogue." The author links this problem to questions of pluralism and power.
A truly dialogic educational perspective would cultivate the "novelistic" capacity to empathize with the beliefs of others. The process of reading novels by identifying with characters unlike oneself, and the process of understanding events by imagining what else could have happened, both train people in intellectual and moral empathy.
Our analysis reveals two major types of "Community of Learners" (COL) projects in education: instrumental and ontological. In instrumental COL, the notion of "community" is separated from the notion of "instruction" in order to reach some preset endpoints: curricular or otherwise. We notice three main instrumental COL models: relational, instructional, and engagement. Ontological COL redefines learning as an ill-defined, distributed, social, multi-faceted, poly-goal, agency-based, and situated process that integrates all educational aspects. We will consider two ontological COL projects into: narrowly dialogic and polyphonic.
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