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Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
A162
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Dialogic education for and from authorial agency
Eugene Matusov
University of Delaware, USA
Mark Smith
University of Delaware, USA
Elizabeth Soslau
University of Delaware, USA
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
Chestnut Hill College, USA
Katherine von Duyke
Newmann University, USA
Abstract
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.
ISSN: 2325-3290 (online)
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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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.
Eugene Matusov is a Professor of Education at the University of Delaware. He studied developmental
psychology with Soviet researchers working in the Vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher
before immigrating to the United States. He uses sociocultural and Bakhtinian dialogic approaches to
education. His recent books are: Matusov, E. & Brobst, J. (2013). Radical experiment in dialogic
pedagogy in higher education and its Centauric failure: Chronotopic analysis and Matusov, E. (2009).
Journey into dialogic pedagogy
Mark P. Smith, Ph.D. is a researcher interested in the role of dialogue in fostering student agency and
the relevance of the educational environment for life. He has also worked full-time with international
students an English as a second language teacher.
Dr. Elizabeth Soslau is an assistant professor in the School of Education. Her research focuses on
experiential learning opportunities within student teaching. Her recent work, situated in urban contexts,
explores equity issues. She investigates questions such as: How do candidates’ emotional needs
interrupt their ability to process learning experiences? What opportunities do candidates have to develop
adaptive teaching expertise? In what ways can teacher educators promote candidates’ sense of agency?
How do teacher educators manage racial stress when providing field instruction for White candidates in
diverse schools? Elizabeth’s work has appeared in journals such as Teaching and Teacher Education,
Action in Teacher Education, and Educational Action Research. Her clinical work includes coordinating
the student teaching practicum, providing field instruction in urban schools, and teaching graduate and
undergraduate courses in diversity and action research methodology. Before pursuing her Ph.D.,
Elizabeth taught middle school in the Philadelphia School District.
Ana Marjanovic-Shane is an Associate Professor of Education at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.
She studies meaning making in education and play, dialogic educational relationships and events,
dialogic teacher orientation, and the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education.
She uses sociocultural and Bakhtinian dialogic orientation in her studies. Her articles were published by
"Mind, Culture, Activity Journal", "Learning, Culture and Social Interaction", and as book chapters in
books on play and education. Her most recent publication is: Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2016). "Spoilsport" in
Drama in Education vs. Dialogic Pedagogy. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 4.
Katherine von Duyke received her Ph.D. in Sociocultural and Communal Approaches to Education from
the University of Delaware under the guidance of Dr. Eugene Matusov in 2013. Her research has
focused on innovative educational practices: she has critiqued open democratic schools, analyzed the
way student agency is conceptualized in education, and evaluated educational discourses for their ability
to connect with student thinking. Deeply influenced by the works of L.S. Vygotsky, and M. Bakhtin she
argues that education has traditionally focused on cultural transference, or an ideal of what culture should
be. Instead, she suggests education can support students’ meaning making participation in and reflective
and creative reinterpretation of culture.
!!"
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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…a main trait of human reality is to transcend itself…
(Boesch, 1993, p. 15)
Dialogic education for and from authorial agency
The purpose of this article is to introduce, articulate, and discuss a new pedagogical approach:
dialogic education for and from authorial agency (DEFFAA) and exemplify it in the field of teacher
education. This approach is based on Mikhail M. Bakhtin's (1985-1975) ontological dialogic ethics that he
developed working within literary studies (Bakhtin, 1986, 1993, 1999) and that has important implications
for education. As far as we know, Bakhtin’s ontological dialogic ethics has not yet been fully realized in
education and teacher preparation. We, along with other colleagues, have aimed at translating Bakhtin’s
philosophical ideas in the field of education (Bibler, 2009; Dysthe, Bernhardt, & Esbjørn, 2013; Fecho,
2011; Lefstein & Snell, 2013; Lensmire, 1994, 1997; Lobok, 2001; Matusov, 2009; Sidorkin, 1999;
Wegerif, 2007). This new approach to education is an extension of an authorial approach to teaching and
learning developed by Matusov (2011a) inspired by Bakhtin's ontological dialogic ethics. We will define,
compare, and contrast the dialogic education for and from authorial agency (Matusov, von Duyke, &
Kayumova, 2016) to the technological approach (rooted in traditional models of teaching and learning)
(Matusov, 2011a) by focusing on how these approaches promote or demote human agency in education.
We chose a dichotomous1 presentation of these two espoused educational approaches because our new
pedagogical DEFFAA approach has emerged in dialogic and ideological opposition to the conventional
approach. We are aware that these approaches can be more complexly described in terms of theory-in-
action2, which guides the pedagogical practice of the practitioner, but analysis of this complexity is
beyond the purpose of this conceptual paper.
Technological approach to education and its failure
Elsewhere, Matusov (2011a) argues that both the mainstream conventional and even some
innovative institutionalized education are shaped by a technological approach. This technological
approach to education focuses on guiding students along some well- or ill-defined learning trajectory to
arrive at preset curricular endpoints (i.e., educational standards, Ravitch, 1995). A technological
approach requires the teachers to specify what their students “will know or able to do by the end of a
lesson” (or a course, an academic term, a school career) (Taubman, 2009).
There are two major approaches within a technological educational framework. In an admittedly
extreme instructionalist version of the technological approach common in many conventional schools, the
students’ learning trajectory is seen as well-defined through lock-step, fully scripted lessons. The
teacher’s instructional decisions are similarly guided by unilateral, universal, decontextualized scripts,
1 It is interesting that some reviewers and the editor of another journal asked to justify the use of dichotomous approach in our
analysis. In our view, the unconditional opposition against a dichotomous analysis has become almost total in social science
academia. We want to point out that the total opposition against any dichotomous analysis is self-contradictory and unsustainable
because it creates a new dichotomy between “dichotomous” versus “non- dichotomous” analysis. In our view, it is much more useful
to consider fruitful vs. non-fruitful dichotomous and non- dichotomous analysis in particular contexts. For example, it may be fruitful
to develop dichotomy between slavery and free labor despite much complexity and nuances of particular cases when moral
judgment is going to pass. Dichotomies can be very useful for contrasts and boundaries rooted in value judgments. On the other
hand, it is true that dichotomies may prevent from considering nuances when value judgments are not very important or weak. A
historical analysis of use of dichotomies and current total opposition to them in social sciences is overdue but outside of the scope of
our paper. However, we urge reviews and editors not to censor or reject dichotomous analysis just because it is dichotomous. We
are thankful to the editor who asked us to justify our position on a dichotomous analysis rather than demand to eliminate it.
2 See the discussion of differences between “espoused theory” and “theory-in-action” in Argyris and Schön (1978). In short, the
espoused theory involves declaration of the principles that the practitioner believes shapes his or her practice. In contrast, the
theory-in-action involves patterns that actually guide the practitioner’s actions. The espoused and in-action theories may have
complex and diverse relations; they may match or not match each other, be compatible or incompatible with each other, and so on.
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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ideally tested by statistical, double-blind randomized research that is often referred to as “research-based
best practices” (e.g., Hargreaves, 1996; Hunter & Hunter, 2004; Slavin & Madden, 2001).
By contrast, in a constructivist3 version of the technological approach used in some innovative
schools and classrooms, the students’ learning trajectories are often seen as ill-defined, but they all still
reliably lead to preset curricular endpoints. These learning trajectories can be negotiated between the
teacher and the students, usually requiring contextual, interactional, and often uniquely artistic teaching.
Constructivist technological teachers thus often promote the students’ own learning activism, and
collaboration between the teacher and the students, while the ultimate goal is still to arrive at the
predictable conventional knowledge and skills preset by the teacher in advance. They try to
“psychologize” and personalize the important curricular endpoints preset by the society (Brown &
Campione, 1994; Dewey, 1956).
However, Matusov (2011a) insists that in whatever version (instructionalist or constructivist) it is
found, a technological approach to education assumes that all students will and should arrive at the
preset curricular endpoints. It is important to reiterate that learning trajectories to such preset curricular
endpoints may be ill-defined; it could be that a teacher is not so much promoting a lock-step, scripted
curriculum, but rather may have in mind certain preset “curricular standards” such as knowledge, skills,
dispositions, or attitudes (Taubman, 2009). For example, a teacher may promote collaboration with
students in the discussion of an interpersonal problem in a classroom, but may ultimately be most
concerned with ensuring that a student takes away from this discussion the teachers’ preset definition of
what a “bully” is and the teachers’ preset attitude that it is always wrong to “bully” someone (Smith, 2010).
The students’ own subjectivities — students’ own interests, concerns, needs, inquiries, funds of
knowledge, worldviews — are often either bracketed from the instruction or exploited often as “prior
knowledge” or “misconceptions” in order to move the student to the preset curricular endpoints. Since the
curricular endpoints are known in advance and determined outside the scope of the students’ affinities,
desires, aspirations, goals, social emergent dynamics, contextual and ethical limitations, — this approach
inhibits (and often diverts) students’ agencies in the targeted practices so the students stop seeing
themselves as legitimate and eager participants (Hammer & Zee, 2006). Further, when endpoints of
education are known in advance, any genuine dialogue in education is impossible (Matusov, 2007),
making educational practice profoundly monologic. Indeed, since the espoused goal of conventional
education is to make students’ consciousnesses and subjectivities predictably arrive at preset ready-
made curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards) — predetermined truths known by the teachers, by
the State, and/or by the conventional schooling system in advance, — genuine dialogue based on
humanity and respect between the students and the teacher is impossible (Matusov, 2007).
However, the technological approach to education has remained ubiquitous to this day. It is not
an accident that Bakhtin used examples of conventional schooling to illustrate his concept of extreme
monologism (Matusov, 2009):
In an environment of … [excessive] monologism the genuine interaction of consciousness is impossible and
thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. In essence … [excessive monologism – the authors] knows only a
single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth
3 It is important to stress here that not all constructivist pedagogical approaches are technological in their nature — not all of them
insist on arriving at the curricular endpoints preset by teachers and/or by the State (see discussion of the diversity in constructivist
approaches in Pegues, 2007; Phillips, 1995; Windschitl, 2002).
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it
follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue4 (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 81, emphasis is added).
In Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s literary masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, he argued
that excessive monologism is employed to manipulate the consciousness of another person towards
predetermined endpoints and, hence, to make the other predictable, calculable, and controllable. When
this project is realized, the technological educational practice causes humiliation, disrespect,
dehumanization, and denial of agency of another person:
Truth is unjust when it concerns the depths of someone else’s personality.
The same motif sounds even more clearly, if in somewhat more complex form, in The Brothers Karamazov, in
Alyosha’s conversation with Liza about Captain Snegirev, who had trampled underfoot the money offered him.
Having told the story, Alyosha analyzes Snegirev’s emotional state and, as it were, predetermines his further
behavior by predicting that next time he would without fail take the money. To this Liza replies:
. . . Listen, Alexey Fyodorovich. Isn’t there in all our analysis – I mean your analysis . . . no, better call
it ours – aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man – in analyzing his soul like this, as it
were, from above, eh? In deciding so certainly that he will take the money? [SS IX, 271-72; The
Brothers Karamazov, Book Five, I]
(Bakhtin, 1999, p. 60, the italics is original)
Based on this Bakhtinian point of view, conventional schools based on a technological espoused
approach are humiliating, disrespecting, dehumanizing, and denying of the authorial agency of children.
This technological orientation proceeds not from a humble human plane but “from an above”, “the
bird’s or God’s eye’s” vista as if “the One who is Above” is 1) is morally better, 2) knows better what is
good for a student, i.e., Benevolent Dictator, and 3) is all knowing, i.e., Expert#1. This technological
approach positions the teacher to impose ready-made curricular endpoints on his/her pedagogical object
(i.e., students), while at the same time releasing the One “from above” -- i.e., the designers of the
curricular standards and tests -- from epistemological, moral, emotional, and/or ethical responsibility.
The proponents of a technological approach (e.g., Hirsch, 1996; Ogbu, 2003) would likely object
to this Bakhtin-inspired characterization of their practice, arguing that they do not intend to rob students of
their authorial agency. Rather, they want to empower the student’s authorial agency by providing students
with cultural capital (Delpit, 1995; Lareau & Weininger, 2003) — a powerful toolkit of essential knowledge,
skills, and dispositions – thus empowering students to do whatever they wish to do in future after their
education is over. It is not important for the students to be interested in the technological learning
activities through which they are supposed to learn this toolkit. Rather, using economic terms, educational
researchers Nilsson and Wihlborg (2011) have articulated the technological view that conventional school
learning activities have an “exchange value” — value that other people may be interested — but not a
“use value” — a self-consumed value. The learning activities are important as opportunities for the
students to learn essential skills and knowledge, usually for their future lives, rather than to be consumed
by the students as interesting or relevant to their own purposes here and now. For example, conventional
school often teaches students to read in general as a universal skill – so they can read whatever they
want in their future. School reading does not necessarily need to be interesting, relevant or important for
the students except as a byproduct of learning more essential and universal reading skills and strategies.
4 In this context, the term “dialogue” refers simply to social interaction (Matusov, 2009).
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
A167
What students choose to read later in their future is up to the students themselves, as the conventional
school does not interfere in students’ future choices or impose on their future. Thus, the conventional
school provides students with a “toolkit” of essential skills and knowledge (i.e., “cultural capital”, cf.
Hirsch) regardless of the specific, current and future desires and goals of the students. Even when the
students’ interests in reading are acknowledged and encouraged, these “emergent situational interests”
and “sustained personal interests” are viewed not as good or important in themselves, but in terms of
opportunities for teaching students universal reading skills. In essence, these educational researchers call
for exploitation of the students’ emergent and personal interests for such universal learning (Alexander,
2005). In this example, reading is viewed instrumentally, separate from its goal defined through the
person’s desires.
However, as Matusov (2011a) shows, the very notion of a tool (in the metaphor of toolkit of
essential knowledge and skills) is heavily based on the desire of the person who uses the tool. This
psychological concept of tool was developed by the German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler (1973)
at the beginning of the 20th century in his studies of the mentality of apes. Köhler argued that the concept
of tool is impossible without the concept of desire. Without the individual’s desire, a tool, which mediates
a desire, stops being a tool. Thus, without students’ desires a tool cannot exist. Yet, students' desires are
usually excluded by the technological approach to education (Taubman, 2009), except for a desire to
please the teacher and/or parents, to reach or be on the top of the school-created standard of
achievement (i.e. high GPA), and/or to achieve credentials for entering certain professions. In the
technological approach, students’ personal and authorial desires, goals, and problems are usually not
legitimate aspects of schooling practice and are often subjected to severe suppression or exploitation by
the school system, in its effort for unilateral control (Ben-Peretz, 2001). School systems concerned with
this type of technological approach demand students’ unconditional cooperation with teachers and the
school authority. Therefore, the normal tool mediation of students’ personal desire is transformed into tool
mediation of students’ wishes or needs to conform to, and satisfy the teacher (i.e. to please the teacher
as one who is ‘the deliverer of the system’) who communicates how to arrive at the preset curricular
endpoint, – another and distorted tool mediation all together (DePalma, Matusov, & Smith, 2009). This
phenomenon is especially evident when students choose to act according to school procedures – what
they think the teacher and/or school wants from them, – even in obvious contradiction to their own sense
and experience (Boyer, 1983; Matusov, 2015b). Students are encouraged to suspend articulating their
own concerns about the value of a task (e.g., “you’ll need this information later” or “maybe we’ll have time
to discuss this more at the end of the unit”). In our view, this is arguably true even for a constructivist
version of technological approach, because the curricular endpoints (e.g., curricular standards) are
predetermined by the educational authorities or curriculum designers, completely disregarding students'
ontological desires.
In schools governed by technological approach, students often learn to unconditionally obey,
resist or ignore the teacher’s demands, without getting caught and they learn to “smuggle in” their own
interested learning (DePalma, et al., 2009). Students’ authorial agency is thus usurped in such efforts,
which often exist in parallel to the teachers’ resistance to their students’ desires, goals, and problems.
The technologically-oriented teachers often desire not to engage students in subject matters in any depth
either because of the teachers’ own disinterest in the targeted academic subject or because they are
afraid to lose their control over the lesson (so-called "off-script", Kennedy, 2005). In addition, conventional
teachers often lack of depth about the subject matter. They are often concerned about control, time,
and/or the targeted curricular standards that need to be “covered” by the lesson, which distract the
teachers from authentic teaching (Kennedy, 2005; Matusov, 2009, 2011a; Smith, 2010). McNeil (1986)
argues that many teachers in a technological approach teach “defensively,” in that their primary effort is to
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
A168
ensure student compliance by predictably arriving at the preset curricular endpoints and to prevent
“disciplinary problems,” the potential student rebellion against teacher-unilateral or effort-consuming
demands. Thus, they avoid going into subjects with students in depth. Ultimately, some teachers in a
technological approach to education, despite their espoused teacher philosophy, are primarily concerned
with “management” of students over teaching and guiding, to seek the “control of student resistances to
the smooth flow of classroom work processes” (Carlson, 1992, p. 190). A similar concern has been
expressed by Kennedy (2005), who noted that the primary fear of the teacher is for students to move “off-
script,” away from the pre-planned endpoints. This may occur because conventional teachers are often
not encouraged to seek or use their students’ cues as directions for curriculum development especially
when working in traditional schooling systems under pressure and stress of the recent neoliberal
educational reforms like the President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and/or the President Obama’s “The
Race to the Top” (Matusov, 2011b; Soslau, 2012).
Thus, we judge that a technological approach fails to deliver its own promise of empowerment of
students with a “toolkit” of essential ready-made knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes. This is
evident in a so-called “lack of transfer” (when students can't "apply" what was presumably "learned" to a
new or unique situation) (Lave, 1988), academic disengagement and boredom (Yazzie-Mintz, 2006),
shallow understanding (Boyer, 1983), use of pedagogical violence by teachers (Sidorkin, 2002), primacy
of concerns of classroom management issues and teacher authority over engaging in academic subjects
(McNeil, 1986), and so on (Matusov, 2009). We claim that agency-free technological education fails to
empower the students’ authorial agency in the future – the goal that this type of education sets for itself in
the idea of the powerful toolkit that empowers students to do what they want after education is over. We
suspect that a technological pedagogical approach of the conventional schools is rooted in the need of
the modern economy and institutions for workers who act like smart machines that can arrive at
predictable preset outcomes or solve problems set by other people (Mitra, 2013; Zhao, 2009). We
hypothesize that authorial successes of some students in technological education are achieved despite,
rather than due to, an agency-free technological approach5.
Dialogical Education For and From Authorial Agency
The DEFFAA approach to education with its focus on promotion of student agency in a critical
dialogue is radically different from technological approaches to education. 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
agency6 cannot be preset because it is inherently based on goal- and problem-defining processes7,
creativity, unpredictability (Lobok, 2001), education-for-an-unknown-future, production of culture8
(Berlyand, 2009; Bibler, 2009), novelty, surprise by the self and the others (Berlyand, 2009; Bibler, 2009;
Matusov, 2009, 2011c; Miyazaki, 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 Matusov and his colleagues (2016) discuss and contrast non-authorial notions of agency.
7 This focus on goal and problem-defining processes can be contrasted with a more conventional focus on problem-solving (cf.
Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 1999), which imply goals and problems firmly preset by others in advance and not negotiable with the
student. These goals are usually set monologically and are pre-planned by the teacher.
8 In contrast to education as reproduction of ready-made culture, education-for-well-unknown-past (or education for poorly foreseen
future rooted in the past) involves students’ production of culture, culture making based on their here-and-now interests, needs, and
inquiries.
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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tests), and contribution to self and others within and outside the school practices (Collins & Halverson,
2009).
The dialogic concept of authorial agency
Matusov (2011a) has proposed an alternative, authorial approach to education based on
recognition of the student’s authorial agency as the central concern of education. He called it “an authorial
approach” because both the teacher and the student are seen as unique authors of their guidance,
learning, and education. Buchanan (1979) argued that a human being is different from all other animals in
being “artifactual” – i.e., creating new cultural constraints that promote new desires and new subjectivities
in his or her own new and not fully predictable being, “We are, and will be, at least in part, that which we
make ourselves to be. We construct our own beings, again within limits. We are artifactual, as much like
the pottery shards that the archaeologists dig up as like the animals whose fossils they also find” (pp. 94-
95). Criticizing the existing economic models of education as “human capital”, based on a technological
approach focusing on well-defined preset curricular endpoints, Buchanan argued, “А good part of
education can be modeled appropriately neither as capital investment nor as consumption of final
services. Instead it must somehow be modeled as ‘spending on becoming’ – on becoming the person that
we want to be rather than the one we think we might be if the spending is not made in this way” (p. 96).
However, as he argued further in his paper, “we” (i.e., students, parents, society) do not know what we
want of this new, becoming; “we” will become "we" as “we” reach this new becoming. Thus, Buchanan
suggested, the goal of education should focus on opening opportunities for students for furthering their
not fully known “becoming,” and the new transcending of themselves, instead of any well-defined
curricular endpoints, or ready-made curricular standards which are known in advance, as in a
technological agency-free education.
Basing his definition of human authorial agency on scholarship by Spinoza, Bakhtin, Buchanan,
Bateson, Argyris, Schön, Sidorkin, and Bibler, Matusov (2011a) abstracted the following crucial, but not
exhaustive, aspects of authorial agency:
1. Person’s transcendence of any preset, given, existing limits, expectations, and norms of a sociocultural
practice (Bakhtin, 1993; Buchanan, 1979);
2. Recognition and validation of the underlining value of this transcendence by relevant others and the self
(either positive and/or negative) (Buchanan, 1979);
3. Recognition of the cause of the transcendence in oneself, irreducible to anything else (causa sui)
(Buchanan, 1979; Spinoza, White, & Stirling, 1910);
4. Personal and social responsibility for this transcendence and its recognition (i.e., requiring justification-
response by others and the self, Bakhtin’s insistence on “non-alibi-in-being”) (Bakhtin, 1993; Buchanan,
1979)9;
5. Creation of a new definition of quality (i.e., what is good and bad) of the practice through this transcendence
and its recognition – the criteria for quality do not fully preexist the deed of the agency (i.e., Aristotelian
notion of praxis in contrast to poïesis, where the definition of the quality of the activity is preset) (Argyris &
Schön, 1978; Aristotle, 2000; Bateson, 1987; Matusov & Hampel, 2008);
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,
9 Buchanan (1979) wrote, “If individual man is to be free, he is to be held accountable, he is to be deemed responsible for his
actions. But at the same time he is allowed to take credit for his achievement. Who can claim credit for results that could have been
predicted from nature? From а knowledge of his genetic endowment or his social environment, or both? But once man is conceived
in the image of an artifact, who constructs himself through his own choices, he sheds the animalistically determined path of
existence laid out for him by the orthodox economists’ model. А determined and programmed existence is replaced by the uncertain
and exciting quest that life must be” (p. 110).
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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 transformation10, culture making,
and culture production (Berlyand, 2009; Bibler, 2009; Lobok, 2001);
9. Disagreement, mis- and non- understanding, non-participation, non-cooperation, and collision of participants’
desires are birthmarks of authorial agency (Matusov, 1996, 2001, 2011c);
10. Authorial agency is unpredictable, ontological, unique, personal, and eventful (Bakhtin, 1993; Buchanan,
1979; Lobok, 2001; Matusov, 2009; Sidorkin, 1999);
11. The human nature reveals itself in the authorial agency.
In contrast to the above listed aspects of authorial agency, the focus of technological, agency-free or
agency-exploitative approaches to education is on the reproduction of the given culture, arrival to an
official agreement and consensus, and/or establishing standards of participation and human subjectivity.
Such approaches, common for conventional institutionalized education, dehumanize people and
suppress their agency. Creativity, originality, and uniqueness are not scarce properties of a small number
of cultural, political, scientific, artistic, or economic elites, a very few innately gifted geniuses, and/or
authorities; rather, creativity, originality and uniqueness are the essence of humanity, precious features of
any human being both in his or her past, actuality, and future potentiality (Csikszentmihalyi &
Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Grant, 2016; Matusov, 2011a; Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). The perplexing issue
for education here is the degree to which the recognition, value, scope, and promotion of human authorial
agency leads us to envision diverse socially valuable practices for particular people. It could well be that
this envisioning lies outside of the arena of institutionalized education, where there is little or no concern
with pre-set curricular endpoints, and where there is greater recognition and value of the person’s
peripheral and full participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in valued societal practices11.
In contrast to a technological approach which sees meaning as pre-existent to engagement in
education, Bakhtin (1986; 1999) argued that meaning making processes are essentially dialogical
processes involving at least two consciousnesses: the addressing and the responding consciousness to
the other. These two consciousnesses are opaque and non-transparent to each other: they are genuinely
interested in what one asks and how the other replies (Matusov, 2015a). To emphasize this important
fact, Matusov (2011c) has introduced a notion of interaddressivity, in which involving consciousnesses
expect to be surprised by each other (and by themselves), and thus value and respect each other’s
authorial agency. In contrast, excessive finalizing, objectivizing, calculating, and/or manipulating of
another person reduce or even suppress the human authorial agency of the other person (and sometimes
the person’s own agency if these actions are directed on the person’s own self) (Matusov & Smith, 2007).
Dialogic authorial approach to education
In the dialogic authorial espoused approach to education, the authorial agency of the student and
the teacher is valued and recognized by the participants as the primary goal of education – first and
foremost by the teacher (and supported by the school system). Matusov and his colleagues (Matusov,
2011a, 2015b; Matusov & Brobst, 2013; Matusov, von Duyke, & Han, 2012) argue that in a dialogic
classroom a student’s authorship can take two qualitatively distinct forms:
10 As Hegel argued, an individual “cannot define the goal of his action until he has acted…” (cited in Leontiev, 1981, p. 62).
11 However, there is still arguably a great need for standards-based participation in economy and bureaucratic institutionalized
practices, at which technological agency-free education is directed. Increasing automatization, robotization, telecommunication,
nanotechnology, and, computerization as well as outsourcing both blue and white collar standards-based jobs to China and India
may soon decrease the demand for technological agency-free education in favor of agency-based education, DEFFAA (Kaku, 2011;
Pink, 2005; Zhao, 2009).
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1. the student’s responsive authorship, in which the student provides creative, interested, and substantive
responses to the teacher’s assignments and questions (i.e., teacher’s dialogic ontological provocations) –
these students’ responses transcend the teacher’s expectations and surprise the participants (teacher and
students), and
2. the student self-generated authorship, in which students initiate (individually or collectively) new projects,
new inquiries, self-assignments, self-initiated readings and discussions (i.e., self-initiated academic
assignments and self-committed long-term learning journeys) that they want to do and pursue.
The difference between these two forms of student authorship can be blurry due to their dialogic and
agentive nature: the responsive authorship always has a self-generating aspect while the self-generating
authorship is always responsive and addressive (Matusov, 2011a, 2015b; Matusov & Brobst, 2013).
Nevertheless, these two forms of student authorship establish their own qualities and can even
be in contradiction to each other. Indeed, student self-generating authorship requires resources of time,
space, materials, and even human resources out of the school (i.e., involvement of interested persons
outside the classroom) to be free from teacher-initiated assignments and questions (Greenberg, 1992;
Neill, 1960), while the student’s responsive authorship heavily depends on the teacher’s dialogic
ontological provocations (Matusov, 2009). Matusov and Brobst (2013) speculate that these two forms of
student authorship may constitute two developmental phases of student agency in a given social practice
of students moving from responsive to self-generated authorship. Alternatively, the over-reliance on the
teacher-initiated form of student agency may be based on the need for a student to be provoked to
engage, a phenomenon, which arguably has been generated by the students’ socialization within a
traditional schooling model. The amount of time the student has been previously socialized into a
traditional schooling model is related to the amount of time the student may need for de-socialization in
conventional technological education, i.e., conventional technological school detoxification, – see the
literature on the Free School (Holt, 1972), Summerhill (Neill, 1960, p. 3), homeschooling (Llewellyn, 1998,
pp. 127-130), and Sudbury Valley School Model (Greenberg, 1992).
A dialogic authorial approach to education emphasizes the unpredictable, improvisational,
eventful, dialogic, and ontological nature of education (Lobok, 2001; Matusov, 2009). Students tentatively
arrive to their own undetermined, transitional curricular endpoints; these endpoints are not predicted by
the teacher and by the students themselves. Students’ desires, problems, interests, and goals are central
in authorial education and their participation in socially desired practices is viewed by the teachers as
legitimate, negotiable, creative, active, and peripheral. The legitimate peripheral participation (Lave &
Wenger, 1991) is initially evident in the students’ self-sustained “opinionship” (Matusov & von Duyke,
2010), not yet being bounded and engaged with diverse important opinions, evidence, and voices of
others in the field (and beyond). However, with students’ increasing participation, the peripheral nature of
their participation becomes more and more questionable and contestable by the participants in the
educational process and by relevant outsiders within an “internally persuasive discourse” (Bakhtin, 1991;
Matusov & von Duyke, 2010). In such discourse, the students and other participants begin perceiving
themselves as ever more full participants who legitimately author the practice; they are also recognized
as such by relevant others. Learning occurrence, duration, and its content are not limited in time and
space, or by guidance (Collins & Halverson, 2009). The purpose of authorial education, dialogic
education for and from authorial agency (aka DEFFAA), is to promote the students’ agency and unique
voices in socially desired practices – voices which are recognized by the students’ themselves and others
relevant to the practice. However, we want to emphasize a contested nature of the “socially desired
practice” notion – who, how, and what defines this social desirability of a practice remains and should
always remain questionable, problematized, and negotiated in the society.
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What can provide a source for promotion of authorial agency within authorial education are big
dramatic dialogic events in which there is a collision of the participants' incompatible desires directed at
each other (e.g., between the teacher and the students and among the students). The participants often
want from each other what the other party does not want to do. Even in light of the fact that personal
desires may have shared social, historical and cultural aspects, and the fact that these desires emerge
through shared here-and-now experiences, the compatibility and synchronicity of diverse desires are not
guaranteed.
In a technological approach to education, this collision of incompatible desires directed at each
other is resolved monologically and unilaterally in favor of the teacher’s (or the educational authority's)
desire to make the student arrive at the curricular endpoints preset by the teacher. Thus, the student’s
incompatible learning desire is viewed as illegitimate, unless it happens to be in the exact concord with
the teacher’s desire that is often shaped or exacerbated by the state standards.
In contrast, the success12 of dialogic authorial education is always unfinalized, interpretative, and
potentially contested. In other words, the definition of “good education” and “the quality of education” is a
part of education itself, focusing on dialogic testing of students’ conflicting alternative ideas and desires
(see the notion of "praxis of praxis," in Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012). The definition of “good
education” is rooted in the emergent resolution of this conflict of the participants’ incompatible desires
directed at each other (and the desires of observers who judge the success). Even more, dialogic
authorial education defines itself within this collision of desires. In essence, authorial education cannot be
sanitized from conflict and controversy; it may be messy, uncertain, unpredictable, and its outcomes are
contestable (Smith, 2010) – but these collisions and controversies are viewed as legitimate and often
addressed through democratic processes of decision making (Greenberg, 1992; Neill, 1960). Ultimately,
in the dialogic education for and from authorial agency, the student is led into testing ideas, assuming
new responsibilities and developing new questions and concerns from their participation in socially
desired practices. In turn, the student is brought closer to new sources of support and guidance within the
classroom and in the outside community.
Testing the dialogic authorial approach
In this section, we briefly consider five common challenges to the DEFFAA. We see these five
challenges as the most acute for DEFFAA. Of course, these are not the only challenges to the DEFFAA;
however, we limit our exploration for the scope of this paper. Our purpose is to allow for diverse voices
from the literature on democratic education to intersect with DEFFAA, a thought experiment, which
provides important opportunities for dialogically testing the ideas in our approach.
Where is learning of the existing culture in DEFFAA?
Conventionally, education is viewed as reproduction of the ready-made culture and preparation
for the future making of culture. Some educators are concerned that the dialogic authorial approach does
not promote learning of what is given — i.e., the ready-made culture for the students. Thus, for example,
Adler (1982) argues that students should first learn (for them) new material and new information through
a traditional pedagogy of lecturing, demonstrations, and assignments; only after they reach familiarity with
the new material should a critical Socratic dialogue be applied. These educators view dialogic and/or
authorial approaches (in combination or separate) as complementary to a traditional pedagogy of
12 Applying economic analysis of “use value” and “exchange value” to learning, Nilsson and Wihlborg (2011) argue that the notion of
“success” as a finalized and well-defined category is not compatible with genuine education (of what Matusov defines as “authorial
education”).
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transmission of knowledge or socialization in the existing ready-made culture. In their view, the goal of
dialogic and/or authorial approaches is to deepen understanding of the ready-made culture and to
prepare the students to transcend it.
Our main objection against these approaches is ethical. Authorial agency — transcendence of the
given — is the essence of human being. Any postponement of this essential feature of being constitutes
violence against a basic human right. The given is also constantly learned through its transcendence.
Probably the best illustration of this process is how babies learn their native language. Babies always use
language agentively, for their unique and personal goals in their unique contexts. Socialization in the
conventionality of their native language occurs within this process through their communicative failures
and successes and through guiding corrections by others (Lock, 1980). In contrast to teaching language
in conventional schools, babies do not first learn the forms, norms and conventions of a language, and
only after learning these forms, go about filling such conventional words with their own agentive personal
meanings. Rather, the existing cultural forms, norms, facts, concepts, culture, etc. may and do become a
part of student’s dialogic testing of their own and others’ positions, ideas, solutions, dilemmas, desires,
etc. In other words, the so called “given” in dialogic authorial education is fully present, re-animated,
problematized and deconstructed in the scope of the dialogic testing of ideas, rather than based upon a
pre-set endpoint.
What is wrong with non-dialogic authorial approaches?
As far as we know, there are two major non-dialogic authorial approaches. One is rooted in the
Democratic School Movement (Greenberg, 1992; Holt, 1972; Neill, 1960). It focuses on creating a
democratic school society — “a scaled down democratic society” (Rietmulder, 2009) — in private schools
and promoting autodidactic, voluntary education among students. This approach downplays the quality of
and approaches to teaching, and instead heavily relies on the students’ own learning activism promoted
by the democratic and voluntary nature of the school society. In agreement with the Democratic School
Movement, we think that students should be involved in self-governance and making decisions about
their own education. Defining education as praxis of praxis, where students should explore and define
values of their own education, we agree that educational practice must be democratized13. However, in
our assessment of this non-dialogic authorial approach, while critical dialogue seems to occur in these
schools on a systematic basis, it is limited to issues of interpersonal relations (often conflict resolution),
self-governance, and to availability of alternative ideas and positions in the community14. By contrast, in
our view, this approach does not significantly commit to giving students systematic guidance and
opportunities for critical dialogue on the students’ academic activities. In our observations, a technological
pedagogical approach often highly penetrates academic activities in these schools. We suspect that
students’ and their parents’ (and teachers’?) concerns about fitting into instrumentality of the broader
society may shape their academic pedagogy.
Another common non-dialogic authorial approach can be called the “Romantic social justice”
approach. It focuses on inspiring the students for some important social justice causes and channels their
agentive creativity to explore and approach these causes. This approach has a very strong ontological,
passionate, activist, and agentive character in contrast with alienated conventional education. However,
critical dialogue within this approach may only sporadically occur, and it would be highly limited to the
achievement of the cause and the “right thinking” associated with that cause. Critical challenging of this
13 Currently, we consider adding another capital D to our acronym: Democratic Dialogic Education For and From Authorial Agency
(DDEFFAA).
14 There seems to be a concern with the teacher imposing guidance on the students by suggesting students to study alternative
ideas outside of the community when students do not initiate this move on their own.
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cause may lead to violence, ostracism, expulsion, and so on. Good examples of such an approach are
the Communard Movements in the Soviet Union (Makarenko, 1973; Sidorkin, 1995) and Ron Jones’
pedagogical experiment in Palo Alto, California in the late 1960s (Jones, 1972). In our view, with strict
curbing of critical dialogue by violently taking certain issues out of discussion, this approach often
promotes totalitarianism (C. Becker, Gansel, & Thorwarth, 2011; Caskey, 1979).
Can dialogic authorial approach be scaled up? Is it desirable?
Could the dialogic authorial approach be brought to the schools on a large scale? Can education
actively promote students’ authorial agency in socially desired practices when students’ desires, goals,
interests, creativity, diversity, and problems are welcome in the classroom by the teacher not as tools of
manipulation for the preset curricular endpoints, as some innovative educators want to do, but rather as
central for educational processes? This is a good and important question. In our view, the answer is no,
not within the current educational institutions nor within the current societal economic, political and social
outlook. In our view, in the current need-based economy with its heavy reliance on machine-like human
labor, there are huge pressures to technologize education in order to produce laborers who act like smart
machines. In this broader socioeconomic and cultural context, education is largely organized as survival
experience for the students through series of summative assessments and credentials. Currently, a
dialogic authorial approach is possible on a very limited scale, as small oases supported by local liberal
conditions and by enthusiastic activism of its participants. Nevertheless, we think that is important to try to
create these oases for a dialogic authorial approach to promote human potential and to experiment and
develop it for upcoming societal changes (see below).
1. The Greek word “school” originally meant “leisure.” 15 Conventional schools do not provide leisure for the
students even when they shelter students from labor and provide resources to satisfy their basic needs. All
of the person’s basic needs and necessities (including physical and mental health) are satisfied now and in
the future without the person involved in labor, chores, or assignment-based education,
2. there is no social and psychological stigma for the person of not being involved in labor,
3. there are no anxieties about the present and the future, and
4. there is enough social and material support for the person’s leisure activities. We define “leisure” as an
opportunity for a person’s self-actualization when:
In contrast, guided by a technological approach, conventional school occupies and colonizes the
students’ time with imposed assignments. In conventional schools, students do what other people ask
them to do and not what they decide to do on their own. In contrast, in a dialogic authorial approach,
education is defined as a leisurely pursuit of the critical examination of the self, life, and world in a critical
dialogue.
The good news for a dialogic authorial approach seems to be that the modern economy has been
experiencing a radical change for the first time in the history of humanity, in which an agency-based
economy, society, and education could perhaps become possible. Here are these trends. First, more and
more emerging smart machines are replacing the jobs where humans work like smart machines (Frey &
Osborne, 2013). Second, labor activity in turn gradually becomes more like praxis, where goals and the
quality of activity emerge, and less like poïesis, where goals and the definition of the activity pre-exist of
the activity itself. Third, the need for authorial labor based on the human agentive creativity increases
(Zhao, 2009). Fourth, for the first time in the history of humanity, the need for human’s involvement in
economy — i.e., labor — drops, 47% of total US employment “could be automated…over the next decade
15 It is not an accident that the concept and practice of school-as-leisure emerged in a slavery-based society in Ancient Greece,
where full-time leisure was available for the few at expense of the many.
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or two” (Frey & Osborne, 2013, p. 44). All these trends may create conditions (but not the determination!)
for the emergence of a leisure- and agency-based society that may require a dialogic authorial approach
to education. At the same time, we warn that this transition process can be very painful producing
technological unemployment. Also, the need for authorial labor may also be co-opted by neoliberal
capitalist endeavors, producing youth as portfolios (Gee, Lankshear, & Hull, 1996).
Will non-imposing education work?
Except the Democratic School Movement, all other institutional education seems to be imposing
on the students to force them to study, what to study, how to study, and with whom to study. Even
Democratic Schools are often embedded in the regime of mandatory education and needs-based society
that puts pressures on individual students, their parents, and the teachers to conform to technological
demands (e.g., college admission, graduation credentials). Finally, there is a reasonable concern of
whether people in a leisure-based society will voluntary commit to their education — any education
however it is defined. Would education become an endeavor for very few nerds? Would not a majority of
people choose to entertain themselves instead as it happens in many unemployed people (Appelbaum,
2014)? Of course, as we defined the notion of leisure above, an unemployed worker may rarely
experience leisure being raised and living in a needs-based society. Nevertheless, in our view, this is a
valid concern and an empirical question to investigate16.
What is the relationship between a dialogic authorial espoused approach and other espoused
educational approaches?
Again, with exception of the Democratic School Movement, almost all other educational
approaches try to be monopolistic. They often try to convince the public and the state to impose their
vision of education on all the students, teachers, and educational institutions. To some degree, it makes
sense since they all are convinced in their own vision of education as being better, if not more correct,
than other educational approaches.
In addition to being visionary, like all other approaches that claim that their own particular vision
of education is better than all others, dialogic authorial approach is also inherently pluralistic (Matusov &
Marjanovic-Shane, 2011). Its liberal pluralism — support of all other educational approaches for existence
— is rooted in its insistence that education is praxis of praxis (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012). This
means that the students have legitimate right to explore and define their own education as a part of the
education itself. Ironically, a diversity of educational approaches, which fight with each other, could be
necessary for a dialogic authorial approach to bloom.
The following case study helps us articulate what we mean by the authorial approach to
education and engage in an empirical discussion of the DEFFAA challenges described above.
Sequestering agency: “How can we make Devon do what we want him to do?”
In the previous, mostly theoretical, sections, we conceptualized the dialogic authorial approach to
education, focusing on engaging students in critical examination of the self, the life, and the world. The
purpose of this article is to 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,
16 One way to address this important inquiry indirectly is to do a historical analysis of whether and how people used leisure in
slavery-based or aristocratic societies.
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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.
Background: Purpose of Peter’s college course
The goal of the Diversity in Community Contexts course was for preservice teachers – mostly
middle class, white and suburban females – to learn how to build good relations with mostly Latino/a
minority urban working class children. The class included a 9-week practicum (twice a week for 1.5 hours)
at a Local Community Center (LCC) in a mid-Atlantic U.S. city (for more description of the course and its
practices, see Matusov, 2009).
Unlike what could be experienced in a traditional school practicum, the afterschool site where the
program was located had an open-ended structure, in which children and preservice teachers have
opportunities to engage in activities, which are of interest to the children and where children can reveal
their strengths (Matusov & Smith, 2011).17 The course thus aimed to provide opportunities to the future
teachers (12 female, 1 male) to engage with the children in playing games, conducting technology and art
projects, and so on. The class also provided a safe learning environment for both university students and
afterschool minority children. If our university students did something pedagogically insensitive with the
children, the children had a legitimate right to move away from these students (in contrast to their
schools). The teaching curriculum of the class was constituted by the instructor’s (Peter’s) dialogic
provocations around the preplanned list of topics and by emergent issues at the practicum that both the
instructor and the students brought to the class and web discussions weekly mini-projects and the final
project for the class.
Each semester the preservice teachers generated unique, recursive-through-the-semester “hot
topics” (the students’ term) that generated heated discussion and were considered by the students as the
most important, memorable, and consequential for them personally and/or professionally. In this particular
class one of these hot topics was the university students’ discussion of Devon, an African American 7-
year old boy from the Center. 11 out the 13 total students chose to comment about Devon on the class
forum (Webtalk, N=40 entries) or in their weekly mini-projects (MP, N=7 entries) and insisted on
discussion of this boy during several university-class meetings. Although the class requirement involved a
minimum of 2 Webtalk postings per week on student-selected topic relevant to the course, some students
made more than 2 postings per week. The weekly mini-projects often involved guided explorations of the
topics, discussed in the class and students’ reflective fieldnotes about their work at LCC. There were
more oral discussions of Devon in the class and outside of the class, some of which the professor likely
could not access. One particular preservice teacher, John, made 10 entries about Devon and centered
his 18-page (not counting 32-page appendixes) final project on Devon. Devon had appeared at the
Center only recently and Peter had not known him prior to that semester.
The emphasis here on “hot topics” is based on a dialogic authorial approach, which prioritizes
investigation of an emerging dialogic pedagogical event, issue, or dilemma which provokes replies. The
thread of discussions in response to the event is then investigated through the students’ and teachers’
17 Such an organization runs counter to the trend for afterschool programs for minority, low-income youth to be increasing structured
like technological schooling (e.g., homework help and structured, skills-based lessons) (Halpern, 2002).
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related webpostings18, assignments and class discussions. In the case study below, all webpostings and
class assignments throughout the semester that were related to Devon were analyzed. Like in a verbal
dialogue, a webposting about Devon might emerge in reply to threads or posts which did not immediately
have to do with Devon. The degree to which a thread discusses Devon was based on the judgment of the
instructor researcher-participant.
Data presentation and analysis
Below we provide lengthy quotes from the students and the instructor in order for a reader to not
only understand the students’ intellectual understandings but also to hear their ontological voices
grounded in the participants’ desires. The methodology blends the traditions of self-study (Tidwell,
Heston, & Fitzgerald, 2009) and participatory action research (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007; Herr &
Anderson, 2005). Data were collected from all participants in the case and the instructor carefully
examined his own practice. Rather than using an a priori or open coding method, the researchers
examined the text holistically as a complete narrative. A single event was used to illustrate the
conjectures in the findings.
The flow of the events and our analysis
It became apparent to us that the students had diverse ambivalent attitudes toward Devon, based
on the instructor-researchers’ assessment of the students’ attitude in their webpostings, and student
discussion about Devon in the class. On the one hand, Devon strongly attracted them with his sincerity,
energy, spontaneity, ingenuity, interest in them, enthusiasm, openness, and non-conformism; on the
other hand, the students were also strongly repelled by his non-cooperation, aggression, violence,
freedom, unilateralism, non-participation, resistance, and suspicion of manipulation. It is notable that
Devon attracted their attention, as based in their unprovoked decision to choose to discuss Devon on the
discussion forum and in class assignments from the very beginning of their participation at the Center.
These postings also reflected the preservice teachers’ affection for Devon, and the degree to which they
attempted to build relations with him. A striking ambivalence is apparent in the student postings; several
voices are apparent in the postings, in that the students give their own valuation of Devon, and also refer
to what they have heard or expect others to think of Devon:19
Someone mentioned the other day that Devon was hard to work with. He is. However, I hung out with him the
other day for most of the time we were at the LCC and I thought he was a lot of fun to be around. The way he
cares about his doll [that he carries around the Center with him] is, I think, admirable in a society where that is
constantly being ridiculed [because of its gender stereotypes]. Instead of mocking him, I tried to take the doll
seriously and I think that caught him off guard a little bit. I believe that he just needs someone to hang out with,
so that's what I'm going to do. I have had experience in the past with kids that are typically labeled as "problem
kids" and I have found that once they start to trust you and know that you aren't going to hate them if they mess
up, they start to listen to you more. I think by gaining kids trust at the LCC, we can guide them so much more
than by just coming in and playing a game with them (Alexia, MP, 3/16/200620).
I've been making Devon my little project. He's a rambunctious kid, who means well, but he can often be rude
and uncontrollable. He is often disrespectful and a supervisor there has told me the same thing. I'm going to
try to shadow him as much as I can and guide him. I'll lead through example and I'll attempt to use the
18 Webpostings were a particularly useful form of data since students and teachers responded to each other’s postings on a
discussion forum, engaging in extensive asynchronous dialogue on “hot topics” during the course. Multiple replies were generated
on these topics, and topics regularly shifted in meaning and direction through participation in the forum.
19 Any punctuation, grammar, and misspellings are preserved from the original texts to preserve voices of the participants and the
informal and relaxed atmosphere of the class online communication.
20 First week of the practicum.
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
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collaborative approach. I'm the one initiating this guidance. [S]ince I'm still working with him, I don’t have much
to report on him. He is starting to warm up to me though, because when we were playing soccer he asked me
to join. Despite the fact that he thinks I'm "the mean one" I think we'll have a good time together. I'm sure I'll
learn from him just as he'll learn from me. [I've] found that I don't like how rude many of the kids are. They often
don't respect each other and will call each other names. I'm not sure if its a little kid thing, a cultural thing, or
what. I just don't like it. [But] Devon... he's mine (John, MP, 3/16/2006).
As noted in the postings above, Devon attracted the students both in strongly positive and strongly
negative ways, and discussion of him generated much interest (as seen in the number of replies about
him and references to others’ voices within the individual students’ postings themselves). In the last
posting above, John, the only male student in the class, made Devon his “little project.” Later, Peter
renamed it as “a project for collaboration” for the preservice teachers to learn how to collaborate with
Devon. In our judgment, this renaming was the beginning of Peter’s dialogic ontological provocation for
his students to consider an alternative to their search for effective manipulation of Devon. However, the
students seemed to define this project technologically with the goal to make Devon comply with their
unilateral demands. This was evident in how one of the students formulated it in a class discussion, in her
question to the professor, “How can we make Devon do what we want him to do (but without using
physical violence)?”
We see two important stories in this case based on two conflicts of incompatible desires directed
at each other. The first story in the case is about the unfolding relations between university students and
Devon in their pedagogical desire, incompatible with Devon’s own, to domesticate him, to make him
predictable, controllable, and safe for them (as seen especially in the postings above by Alexia and John).
The second story is about the relationship between the professor and his students. Peter’s own
pedagogical desire, incompatible with his students’ ones, was to introduce a dialogic authorial approach
to his undergraduate students in their relations with Devon as an alternative to a technological approach.
Such dramatic collisions between the students’ and teachers’ desires might become a source for
promotion of authorial agency. Still, Peter’s goal was not to convert the students into a dialogic authorial
approach but rather help them experience, recognize, understand, reflect on, and evaluate it as a
possibility for their own teaching. The goal would be that they be able to compare these two approaches,
so they could make an informed choice between the two approaches (or even think about a third
approach). Peter was ready to accept a possibility that after careful consideration and understanding the
students would have decided to reject an authorial approach. For him, dialogic education for and from
authorial agency involves success when the students’ decisions regarding their own approach to teaching
are informed by considering and testing their professional desires, values, and goals against known
alternatives. Thus, the pre-service teachers would author their own pedagogy in a critical and informed
way. In this authorial approach to education one puts full trust in the students to be the final authority for
and authorship of their own learning (Klag, 1994; Matusov, 1999).
By the time that the events surrounding Devon had emerged, the undergraduate students had
solidly acknowledged that Peter had earned his epistemological authority (in addition to his assigned
institutional authority). They demanded conceptual and practical guidance from him to fulfill their
pedagogical desire for making Devon controllable. In part, their pedagogical desire was probably based
on how they understood the role of the teacher as rooted in their own school experiences. They were also
puzzled by relationship between Peter and Devon, which was paradoxically different from their own
experiences. As John wrote in his miniproject reporting on his interview with Devon about his future
professional aspirations, “What was most disturbing was his initial response to what he wants to be when
he grows up. He wants to be a cop because ‘they steal stuff’ and when he grows up, which to him is age
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ten, he wants to punch people in the face. Later, when Peter asked him, he said he wants to be a doctor
or an artist. (I wonder why he answered differently to Peter)” (John, MP, 4/6/2006). It seemed that Devon
was in different discursive spaces with John versus with Peter. With John, Devon activated the discursive
space of survival, power, and domination fantasizing to be on the top of the power pyramid of the
Universe Abuse (i.e., the US police that in his keen observational eyes, has arbitrary power over his
community). In contrast, with Peter, Devon activated the discursive space of hope fanaticizing about his
creative and caring contribution to the World and People.
In his own turn, Peter supported and legitimated the students’ inquiries and concerns. He tried to
question their pedagogical desires of control of Devon, encouraged them to talk with and, thus,
subjectivize Devon by asking him genuine questions of their own interests (rather than constantly
finalizing and objectivizing him – a common trend in the relations of preservice and inservice teachers
with schoolchildren and community center children studied by Matusov & Smith, 2007). He also tried to
provide his students with alternative approaches and non-technological, non-fool-proof solutions to their
problems based on collaboration and enjoyment of being with Devon. In the following webtalk posting,
Peter emphasized Devon as an agent of his own feelings and in his relationship with the undergraduate
students:
Re: Setting limits to kids in a collaborative way 4/17/2006 10:10 AM
Posted by Peter
Dear Jackie—
I'm really glad that you seem to expand a zone of your comfort of working with some particular kids! Good
job! Please keep experimenting and report (and reflect) on these attempts as you are doing now.
You wrote, "Until Devon jumped on my back and started eating my hair. That was gross! I made him get
down, but he was fixated on getting back at my hair again… I realized that I had to just basically ignore him
for a few minutes to get him to let the hair thing alone..."
This is great that Devon feels comfortable with you. He played with you as he did with other … [university]
students. However, you did not feel comfortable and it is a good idea to communicate it to Devon. You could
have told him, "Devon, I really-really enjoy playing with you. I know that you jump on the back of many my
colleagues, [university] students, and it is probably fine with them. BUT, unfortunately, my back is not very
strong and it is really painful for me. So, please, do not jump on my back. Instead, let's do..." and you can
give an alternative game (e.g., "stone, paper, scissors").
What do you think? Any other strategies? If you decide to use this strategy or other strategies, please, let us
know about the results?
Peter
In the case above, the students did not directly respond to Peter’s suggestions (at least known to us),
which were aimed at placing Devon as an agent with equal rights. However, in some other cases the
undergraduates did directly respond to this agency-based guidance, as seen in the following exchange
between Lora and Peter on the online discussion forum about a child at LCC named MaryJane (Devon
was not the only LCC child who was the object of pedagogical actions of Peter’s students):
Re: Physical force with kids 4/11/2006 3:14 PM
Posted by Lora
Sometimes I feel especially with MaryJane that the children are just looking for attention. It was not anyone’s
fault that she was losing and there was still a good chance she could come back and win the game. I feel
like since she was not winning and did not have a lot of attention on her, she decided to steal the cards. She
knew it would cause her to be watched or chased since the game could not go on without them.
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Re: Testing alternative hypotheses 4/17/2006 10:03 AM
Posted by Peter
Dear Lora—
[…]
Your hypothesis is very reasonable however, it is just a hypothesis. It is very dangerous for us,
teachers, to act out of unchecked hypotheses because at best we can be insensitive to the kids’
educational needs and at worst we can be unfair in the eyes of the kids. It is important to generate
hypotheses and then check them.
Let me give an alternative hypothesis about MaryJane. She may have difficulty to control her
emotions that the game generates in all the participants. Young kids have problem of coordinating
their cognition and emotions. That is why for example little kids cannot play “Hide and Seek” game
because they cannot control their emotions while hiding. Almost all little kids “cheat” because of
that. It is nothing to do with real cold-blood calculated cheating or with striving for attention. For
adults, it is difficult sometimes to understand kids because they are different.
I do not want to say that my hypothesis is better than yours (although I have noticed that novice
educators overuse the hypothesis about kids’ striving for attention). I see an issue of seeing diverse
hypotheses and testing them before acting. Do you know how to test these hypotheses?
Even when there is no time to test hypotheses because actions have to be immediate, it is still a
good idea to keep in mind diverse alternative hypotheses so you can read better contextual clues
of a situation.
Talking with the child involved always can be a plus to test your hypotheses and generate new and
better ones.
What do you think?
Peter
Re: Testing alternative hypotheses 4/17/2006 6:38 PM
Posted by Lora
I agree that there can be many reasons why MaryJane acts the way she does. I think as
teachers we do need to talk with a child who acts out to get to the bottom of the problem.
It could be a simple solution or very complicated.
While it seems from Lora’s posting above that the undergraduate students began to problematize the
afterschool minority children in their web postings, we do not know for sure in the full account how much
the students experimented and engaged in conversations with the children at the Center. However, we
know that they demanded Peter to demonstrate the “effectiveness”21 of his pedagogical approach,
apparently interpreted by them as a technological one. The students demanded that Peter reveal for them
a toolkit of essential pedagogical strategies for their work with children; they wanted to learn portable
decontextualized (but, probably, conditional) strategies, which could be applied to similar situations in
their work with the children. They also wanted to learn universally applicable aspects of children’s
psychology, which could be used for manipulation and control of students in their future classrooms.
However, Peter was ambivalent about “demonstrating the power” of his pedagogical approach because
according to his authorial approach: 1) success could not be guaranteed and 2) his definition of success
focused on the enjoyment of being-together and promoting student authorial agency. On the other hand,
he wanted to prioritize and address his students’ concerns even if he disagreed with these concerns.
Peter thought that a teacher has to start with subjectivity of his or her students (Matusov & Smith, 2007).
This case below, based on Peter’s account of the events, illustrates the demands of the undergraduate
21 Effective in the eyes of the university students because the strategy produced the university students’ desired result (i.e., a preset
behavioral endpoint).
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students for a technological solution to addressing children’s conflicts, even in response to being guided
by Peter to respond to the event with an agency-based approach:
Mr. Dolphin, Mr. Shark, Mr. Tiger, and Mr. Snake: The Peter-Devon play community
I [Peter] was called for help by my students to a small resource room at LCC where at that time board games
and toys were stored in a locked metal closet. When I came in to the resource room, I saw a group of 6-7 of my
students (John, who made Devon his “project,” wasn’t there) staying in a half circle and in the middle of the
room there was Devon with many toys on the floor all around the room. My students explained that Devon
asked them to open the closet with the toys and promised to clean after himself when asked by my students.
When they asked him to clean, he refused. I asked Devon if it were true and he replied it was. I asked him why
he refused to clean up after himself despite his earlier promise, and he told me that he changed his mind. My
students looked helpless, but I saw them expecting some miracle from me, their professor. Meanwhile, Devon
was leaving the room holding a toy shark in his hand.
I picked up a toy dolphin lying on the floor and asked in a pretend voice, “Hey, Mr. Shark, can you help Mr.
Dolphin to clean up this stuff, please?” Devon turned back to me, smiled, and replied also in a pretend voice,
“OK!” We started picking up toys scattered on the floor and putting them back to the closet. My students were
standing above us staring in disbelief without helping us. I noticed a toy tiger and asked Devon in a pretend
voice, “Hey, Mr. Shark, do we need a help from Mr. Tiger?” Devon replied in a pretend voice, “No, Mr. Dolphin,
we will clean by ourselves. We’re friends, Mr. Dolphin.” I said looking at my students in a pretend voice,
“Thanks, Mr. Tiger, for offering your help but Mr. Shark and I clean up ourselves without your help.” My students
did not get the hint I was sending them to join us and have a nice playful moment of collaboration while cleaning
up. Since I was taller than Devon, Mr. Dolphin was lifting toys up to the upper shelves, while Mr. Shark was
cleaning up toys from the floor and passing me the toys. We did not rush and did a lot of playful improvisations;
for example, I was suggesting taking Mr. Snake carefully so it would not bite Mr. Shark with snake poison.
Devon laughed and intentionally dropped Mr. Snake and I would say on behalf of Mr. Snake, “Ouch! I won’t bite
you, Mr. Shark!” and then immediately added in Mr. Dolphin’s character, “Mr. Shark, but can we trust Mr.
Snake? He can change his mind later. Be careful with him!” Devon laughed a lot and handled the toy snake with
care to avoid its mouth. When we were done, Devon suggested doing the cleaning again. But I quickly locked
the closet and told him that we could do it sometime in future but we had to leave LCC for [the university] as the
bus was already waiting for us. He went with us to the LCC door to say goodbye and hugged me at the door.
On the bus, my students expressed their amazement of how skillful I was in making Devon comply with my
wishes. I was rather uncomfortable with their praise because it was not what I was doing. My goal was to have
a good time with Devon while cleaning up the toys rather than to force him to do cleanup. I used a cleanup
situation to create a good playful moment with Devon so we could have fun and enjoy being with each other. I
thus did not see it as an issue of Devon complying with my demands against his own desires. I see his
compliance as an accidental by-product of our enjoyment and good social relations. It was not guaranteed and
it was not imposed on Devon 22. I asked my students why they stood around Devon and me and did not join in
our fun game. My students replied that they did not get that I wanted them to help. I told that it was not about
me wanting them to help, or even helping with the cleaning, but rather about joining in our fun game and having
good time together. I saw that they did not get what I was saying, and I began to think about how to better
explain what I meant to them later on.
Later at LCC, I saw them trying to use “my strategy” of forcing Devon to clean up or do another one of their
demands by using pretend play. This strategy sounded very fake and manipulative in my view. Needless to say,
22 The issue of how much Devon’s clean-up was accidental or not can be contested because Peter centered Devon on the game of
clean-up. In Peter’s view, it was accidental because if Devon (or he) improvisationally deviated from clean-up, Peter would have
followed this new direction. Clean-up was not the final goal but a provocation for joyful being together. However, there might be an
alternative interpretation of Peter’s provocation. See more below in the paper.
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Devon not only refused to comply and engage in the students’ manipulative “games,” but often became rather
violent toward my students. My explanation of his violent replies was that he was very sensitive to being
manipulated by other people. I saw many times how his mother, who was apparently overwhelmed in her life,
was yelling at him and threatening him with beatings when he refused to leave LCC with her (or in reply to
complaints of Devon by the LCC staff). I had no doubts that she did not use empty threats as I saw her being
very physical with him at LCC and on the street outside the Center (Peter’s fieldnote#1 about pretend play
cleanup of 4/3/2006, reconstructed in full on 3/27/2011)
In response to witnessing and discussing this event involving playful, friendly and improvisational
collaboration between Peter and Devon, the students began searching for a powerful and reliable
“strategy” that would work with Devon to make him predictably comply with their demands. This became
apparent to Peter in the students’ replies to him on the class discussion board. In response to his
question about what “approaches” have been “successful”23 with Devon, the students began to talk about
“techniques” which would predictably work with any child (in bold below). Devon was further finalized and
objectivized by the students as a “stubborn” child who is “set in his opinion.” The students’ discourse
moved outside of any authorial relation between themselves and Devon, and instead moved purely onto a
technological plane, despite Peter’s efforts as provoking them in a more authorial direction (the emphasis
is ours):
Helping Devon to help himself 4/3/2006 7:05 PM
Posted by Peter
Dear folks—
Today I notice that when you transform a request into a play with Devon, he becomes very cooperative (and
respectful). For example, he dropped blocks but refused to gather them. Instead he grabbed a toy shark and
prepared to leave a room. I turned the request into a game by asking shark to help to gather the blocks. The
"shark" agreed to help and Devon and I gathered blocks quickly. I used the same approach later when I
asked Devon's mouse to help me collect all puzzle pieces from the floor.
What other successful approaches did you try with Devon?
What do you think?
Peter
Re: Helping Devon to help himself 4/3/2006 9:23 PM
Posted by Mina
I have to be honest, I did not expect Devon to respond the way that he did. I know that with the
way I was raised, little things like not picking up after yourself were not tolerated at all and you
were in a way yelled into, or kind of scared into doing it. This way you learned not to mess
around with the authoritative position and you just knew what to expect if you didn't do it. I
guess you don't always have to get all bent out of shape or aggravated. Instead just get creative.
Techniques for Clean-up 4/5/2006 5:49 PM
Posted by Dominique
23 Peter seemed to use the term “success” as “a boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that had diverse if not opposing
meaning for him and his students. For example, students may have defined success as Devon cleaning up; Peter, however, defined
success as being in the world-with children, building relationships, and sharing a joyful moment. This boundary nature of the
interpretation of "success" stayed obscure for the students, as they did not seem to sense its interpretative ambiguity. Furthermore,
Peter's formulation "I used the same approach" – could easily be interpreted instrumentally, i.e. as part of the technological
approach! Thus, it further masks Peter's authorial approach, instead of revealing it! We wonder if Peter should have further
problematized the diverse notions of success, rather than directly engaging in this discussion of how to promote success
technologically defined by the students.
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
A183
In my past, I have seen a few successful techniques that teachers or people who watch children use. One
technique is to give the child a five minute warning that clean-up time is coming so that they aren’t
surprised and so opposed to it when playtime is done.
Another one has to do with the technique Peter used. Have the kid pretend they are a vacuum cleaner and
put their arms out as they make sounds. This way it seems that they are playing as they "suck up" the toys.
The third way usually worked well on the boys. If you ask them if they have strong muscles, of course
most of them will insist that they do. Then they will pick up the toys and show you how strong their muscles
are getting.
I was just wondering if someone else encountered anyone that has used techniques such as these; both
successful or unsuccessful.
Techniques for Clean-up 4/5/2006 8:23 PM
Posted by Amanda
A teacher I have worked with in the past used the 5 minute warning method. Usually kids will keep playing
but then the teacher starts counting down, so it’s like a game to see who can clean up the fastest or before
she finishes the countdown. I think this would probably work better in a classroom rather than playing a
game with one or two kids, but it’s worth a try.
Re: Techniques for Clean-up 4/6/2006 3:09 PM
Posted by John
Something that I found worked well was asking them to do something, without really asking. When
Devon knocked game pieces on the floor and didn’t pick them up I said, "Well I'm not going to pick them
up." Immediately he got down on the ground and picked up the pieces. INTERESTING!
As demonstrated above, the university students continued to focus on finding effective ready-made
strategies with predictable results that could be applied across all children and contexts with the intent of
eliciting the same compliant behaviour (marked in bold above). In contrast, Peter wanted to show his
university students his authorial approach, which values a child’s agency and focuses on being-together-
in-the-world with the child. Similarly, Nikulin (2010) defined dialogue as the main ontological condition of
the human being, which is always being-together. Such an approach hinges on an improvisational stance
toward emergent events in the world, recognizing and valuing responsive participation and enjoyment in
on-going events. By offering Devon a moment to play, rather than telling him what he must do or not do,
Peter extended an invitation to Devon to be his friend. Devon accepted it and reciprocated by joining the
pretend clean up. As Marjanovic-Shane (2011) argues, creating play is both a mutually voluntary practice
(all participants invite all others and voluntarily join in play but can also legitimately reject the invitation)
and an authorial practice in which the players surprise each other with the unpredictability of each other’s
next move (“play offer”) (cf. the notion of "interaddressivity" in Matusov, 2011c). At the same time, the
players strengthen their trust in each other through collaborating on joint authoring of play events. What
happened in the "Mr. Shark and Mr. Dolphin" play was emergent, unpredictable, and surprising to both
participants (e.g., "Can we trust Mr. Shark?"). At the same time, both Peter and Devon could emerge as
authors of the play content as well as creators of their new friendly relationship. The following field note
of Peter’s playful response to another event illustrates this improvisational nature of authorial relations:
Encouraging Devon’s Agency: Being in the world with children
When I [Peter] entered a computer lab at LCC, I had a sense of déjà vu. Mr. Scott (a LCC staff responsible for
teaching children technology …) was not in the room but many of my [university] students were there with
Francoise (another university instructor), including John. [LCC] Kids were playing on computers located on the
periphery of the long and somewhat narrow room. In the middle of the room, there were long tables with Lego-
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
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Logo blocks on them. Under the tables, Devon left Lego blocks that he played with and did not want to clean
them up. Some of the students and Francoise used “my strategy” asking in their pretend voice “Mr. Shark” to
clean up (there was no toy shark although). Devon refused in his own voice without accepting the role of Mr.
Shark. Some [LCC] kids tried to support my [university] students telling Devon that they would “kick his ass out
of the computer lab” if he did not start cleaning at once. In his turn, Devon told them that he would “kick their
asses out of LCC.” The verbal abuse escalated. My students turned to me expecting me to do something
miraculous.
I was amused by how older kids could use the bossing tone of their voice with Devon – it made me smile. It
presented me with another playful opportunity. I turned to Devon, pointed at him with my finger, and ordered
him in a pretend, overly exaggerated voice of authority, “Devon, I forbid you to clean up! You’ll lose this privilege
today!” Everybody, including Devon, immediately stopped the verbal battle and turned to me in disbelief. Devon
dropped on his knees and started silently cleaning up Legos under the table. I bended under the table and
yelled in a fake anger, “Stop cleaning! I order you stop cleaning!” Devon smiled at me and yelled back, “I will! I
will!” I continued in a fake authority voice, “What a disobedient boy! Stop cleaning at once! I said so! I order to
you!” Devon laughed while he kept cleaning, “No, I will! I won’t listen to you!” I kept insisting in a fake manner,
“Why don’t you listen to me?! I’m your boss!” Devon laughed loudly, “I ain’t have no bosses!” I was improvising,
“What about me?! I’m your boss! They [showing at the people around] can’t boss you around but I can!” Devon
laughed out loud – he was almost hysterical, “Yes, you’re my boss, but I won’t listen to you.” I continued, “Hey,
you, stop cleaning at once! If not, if not…. I… [I made a fake anger face ready to strike]… I’ll join you!” He
laughed at this threat and I joined him cleaning the Legos under the table. We cleaned and laughed a lot. Some
other LCC kids laughed and joined us. Francoise joined us yelling at us in a pretend way that she forbade both
of us cleaning and that she would call Mr. Scott to stop us if we would not stop at once. My students laughed as
well but did not join us even though I, this time openly, encouraged them.
On a bus on our way back to the university, John came to my seat and asked me why Devon listened to me and
not to anybody else. I told John that my goal was not to force Devon to do what I wanted him to do but rather to
have a good time together while cleaning up together and that I did not have any strategy. I told John that in my
view, Devon was sick and tired of people bossing him around and that he was very sensitive to manipulation. I
told him that if I needed to ask Devon, I would ask him but I would also respect him refusing my request. I tried
to encourage John to start treating Devon with respect and enjoying being with him without bossing him around
by focusing on how to make him to do what John wanted him to do. John told me that it was difficult for him but
he would think about that and probably try. And John did. In a week told me about his successful effort after a
class (see his description in his Final Project) (Peter’s fieldnote#2, “I forbid you to clean up!”, sometime later in
April 2006, reconstructed in full on 3/27/2011).
What is notable here is Peter’s focus on having a good time, improvising and being in the world
with children. Invitations to play open up possibilities, explicitly signal the non-obligatory nature of
participation, in which refusal is expected and respected as a legitimate response, and bring forth the
authorship of the participants. This may potentially lead to responsive improvisation within the ongoing
discourse of the children. In doing so, Peter playfully re-voiced, double-voiced, the authoritarian discourse
of the other LCC children (and indirectly other bosses on Devon’s life) while populating it with his own
carnivalistic intonations (Bakhtin, 1999); in turn, he gave a new meaning to this discourse for Devon and
the other children. It is also notable that such an approach to responding to events with children appears
to be something which the university students might find attractive by its apparent gaiety, humor,
collaborative friendly spirit, humanity, kindness, respect, play, mutual teasing, carnival spirit, dethroning of
authority, and powerfulness (Sullivan, Smith, & Matusov, 2009). Yet, it was still confusing and difficult for
them to recognize authorial guidance. Their puzzlement is somewhat understandable since the authorial
approach, in the two examples above provided by Peter, elicited the reaction that the university students
sought. Peter chose to create this puzzlement intentionally to produce “a boundary object” (Star &
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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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Griesemer, 1989) for his students; it was thus important for Peter to create such a boundary object with
which he could address and prioritize the university students’ technological concerns, while at the same
time introducing a new educational approach to them.
On the other hand, an invitation to play may potentially represent quite a powerful influence for an
invited player to agree with the content, the rules and the basis of a play! According to Marjanovic-Shane
(2016), the focus of the participants in play is on building an imaginary situation (chronotope). Without
collaboration and working toward a mutual agreement, this goal is hard if not impossible to achieve
(Marjanovic-Shane, 2011). The play may fall apart when someone refuses to “play” and becomes a
“spoilsport”. It is much more likely for such “boundary negotiations” to take place among the players with
“equal rights” (Bakhtin, 1999) for the negotiations than among the players in hierarchical relationships.
The illegitimacy of contesting the play rules is especially true in educational settings where play,
improvisation and drama are used as pedagogical tools for achieving preset educational goals rather than
authentically for having a good time together. The only option for a child in situations of unequal rank may
be to refuse to play altogether, since s/he does not stand a chance to renegotiate the imagined
chronotope content and rules. The price of refusal, however, may be high. The institutions usually do not
tolerate a “spoilsport”. “[H]e must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community”
(Huizinga, 2009, p. 11). Because of that, it is possible that Devon’s compliance was not completely “an
accidental by-product of our enjoyment and good social relations” as Peter believed (see Peter’s fieldnote
#1 above), but that their enjoyment and good social relations created enough attraction for Devon to
agree with Peter’s play rules and thus join the play. The fact that Devon refused similar invitations to play
by Peter’s students, probably interpreting them as another tool of coercion, might be an additional
indicator that it was the quality of the relationship and the teacher’s focus on being together and having a
good time that created an authentic opportunity for the participant’s authorship.
John’s increasing subjectivizing and problematizing interest in Devon
Initially provoked to do so as a part of Peter’s class assignments and then increasingly on his
own, John chose to spend time and talk with Devon. Here we first identify John’s responsive authorship;
second, we see his emerging self-generated authorship as he became increasingly more committed to a
long-term learning journey with Devon. John increasingly asked Devon more genuine questions of John’s
own interest. Initially, getting to know Devon seemed to be another technological strategy for John, but
then this “strategy” apparently led John to a more authorial approach (emphasis is ours to reflect on
technological and authorial approaches):
I wanted Devon to understand that what he was doing wasn't acceptable but at the same time I didn't want to
lecture him. I've noticed that he doesn't like be lectured. The best way to get through to him is through
friendly suggestions, not flat out correction (John, WP, 3/25/2006).
Something I found most interesting: Devon said that when he has a problem or gets in trouble he would come
to me. I didn't realize the impact I had made on him already. [H]e doesn't like school because he doesn't like to
"get teached." And he dislikes the LCC because he doesn't like being told what to do. … [I]t was very
interesting getting to know Devon better. I learned things about him that I never would have expected and
I look forward to continuously working with him (John, MP, 4/6/2006).
I've noticed as we've been there that the children at the LCC seem to respond differently to verbal commands
than other children I've worked with. Specifically, Devon has made me think about this. I would like to
explore this topic [in my final project for the class]. How do these children like to be asked what to do? Why do
they prefer this way? What is the one way they hate to be told to do something? Is this just at the LCC or in
school as well? All of these questions are important to my projects (John, MP, 4/20/2006)
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It seems to us that in John’s own (school?) experience, other children did not mind or even like
being told what to do. We wonder if “the other children” that John was juxtaposing with “these children”
from the center have been over-socialized in a traditional model and have been so robbed of agency they
did not even know it. In turn, they would not resent and rebel against adult demands the way the LCC
minority children did (especially Devon). It seems to us that because of that, LLC was an ideal
environment to teach preservice teachers how to recognize the dangers of sequestering children’s
(humans’) agency.
John designed his Final Project based on his conversation with Devon about how he wanted to
be treated:
This project was inspired by a specific child at the LCC. I spent a great deal of time with this child and was
constantly observing his behavior and interactions. Devon, age 7, was a rambunctious child with a serious
disrespect for authority. He had many issues with authority because he felt that they were always telling him
what to do. He did not like to be given orders. He would prefer if someone asked him nicely to do something.
However, he often wouldn't respond when he was asked nicely. I found that the best way to have Devon
respond to you was to offer a suggestion:
We were playing a board game and the pieces were knocked to the floor. He made no move to pick
up the pieces so I said to him, "Well I'm not going to pick that up." Immediately, he bent down and
proceeded to pick up all the pieces.
However, I wasn't convinced that this would always work and I found that Devon often contradicted himself.
Therefore I conducted a small study of Devon. I gave him the same survey everyone else completed [about
how they would like to be treated]. It showed that Devon would prefer to be asked nicely, but thought that telling
someone to do something would prove more effective.
However, later that day I observed him interact with another child, which reaffirmed my assertions:
Devon and I were sitting at a table and I looked at him. He said to me, "Don't look at me! Turn around
or I'll kick you in the face!" So I asked him, "Why do you tell me what to do, when you don't like
being told what to do?" The only response he could give was "Sorry."
While Devon would prefer to be asked what to do, we see that he doesn't apply the same philosophies when
addressing other people (John, Final Project, 5/19/2006)
In our view, through his conversations and engagements with Devon, John moved closer to an authorial
approach to education and away from his initial technological. John became genuinely interested in
Devon, wanting to know what Devon thought about John’s topics of interest and taking Devon’s
responses seriously, treating him with the respect of “a consciousness with equal rights” (Bakhtin, 1999).
Devon seemed to accept John’s bid and reciprocated with his own dialogic attitude toward John.
However, in our judgment, John remained in his search for an universal ethical rule based in
Kantian decontextualized universal ethics (Smith, 2010). John expected the logical consistency from
other people, “[As I expected] most of the children were consistent when they would ask someone the
way they would prefer to be asked. The one child that would constantly contradict himself was Devon”
(John, FP, 5/19/2006).
In our view, Devon had been sorry not because he realized a logical inconsistency in his attitudes
to others and himself, as John argued, but because he had probably felt sympathetic to John’s distress,
which Devon recognized that he himself had caused (as John communicated to him). In our
interpretation, in Devon’s view, John called on Devon to take responsibility for his own abusive actions on
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a person whom Devon valued and wanted to be together with, “Something I found most interesting:
Devon said that when he has a problem or gets in trouble he would come to me. I didn't realize the
impact I had made on him already” (John, MP, 4/6/2006). Furthermore, in Devon’s view, John called on
Devon to consider how “we” (i.e., Devon and John) and mostly he, Devon, desired to relate and live
together. In our view, Devon’s reply to John’s call was not to acknowledge that he, Devon, was logically
inconsistent, as a Kantian universal and decontextualized ethics demands (i.e., “to treat others as you
want to be treated”), and as John seemed to interpret it. Rather, Devon’s reply was an acknowledgement
that Devon felt sorry for offending John, a person whom Devon valued, liked, and respected.
We argue that through his own reflection and experimentations guided by Peter, John became
increasingly dialogic in his relation with Devon; arguably, however, John was not yet “polyphonic” in his
responses, as he did not recognize and value his own dialogism (Matusov, 2009; Morson & Emerson,
1989). In our judgment, Peter was successful in building authorial relations with his students (and Devon),
as it was evident in their collaborative explorations of their ways of becoming good teachers and interest
in being together in their classroom. The evidence of authorial relations is discernible in the establishment
of the pedagogical regime of internally persuasive discourse, in which everything could be tested and
testable in his classroom with the preservice teachers (Bakhtin, 1991; Matusov, 2009; Matusov & von
Duyke, 2010; Morson, 2004). However, in our view, Peter failed to make a dialogic authorial approach
visible for his students (even, arguably, including John). This can be seen in the students’ puzzlement
about Peter's relationship with Devon and their understanding of Peter's playful attitude as a "technology"
or a "strategy" to get Devon to their pre-set end-point (to clean up the toys). Even more, when they tried
to "apply" what they perceived as Peter's universal and decontextualized strategy, they "faked" play in a
manipulative way and only managed to make Devon feel uneasy and defensive. We see that Peter failed
to teach an authorial approach to education not because the students did not accept it but because this
approach remained invisible to them. In our view, Peter successfully socialized his students in his
authorial dialogic approach to education, but he did not make it an object of the students’ deep reflection,
consideration, and critical deconstruction. In contrast to the socialization, we define genuine education as
critical deconstruction embedded in “the internally persuasive discourse” (Bakhtin, 1991; Matusov & von
Duyke, 2010).
How could Peter engage his students in considering an authorial approach to education and
make it visible and explicit for them?
It seems that there were four challenges facing future teachers in developing a dialogic authorial
approach. First, future teachers tend to take an overwhelmingly finalizing and objectivizing stance in their
work toward children, treating them as objects of their pedagogical desires and actions, guided by
universal pedagogical techniques (Matusov & Smith, 2007). At the same time, it seems that Peter’s
students experienced their interest and nostalgia for a dialogic authorial approach both in their
relationship with Peter and their occasional relations with some children at LCC (more cooperative than
Devon), as they reported at the end of the class and in the anonymous class evaluation. In these
relations, they seemed to recognize that another way of thinking about children was possible, thinking
about them as excitedly unpredictable and responsible beings-in-the-world. However, after a 9-week
practicum, the students did not yet explicitly recognize and value this way of thinking about children as
possible and/or desirable. Focusing and reflecting on their own enjoyment in the class and practicum
guided by the instructor might have been helpful for the students to notice an alternative, dialogic
authorial, educational approach to what they had been accustomed to. The hidden curriculum of the
authorial approach had to become explicit curriculum.
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Second, as Smith’s (2010) analysis discusses, a “modernist” way of thinking about others and
interpreting events in the world dominates the future teachers’ discourse about their work with the
children. This modernist approach demands Kantian universal de-contextualized ethics, separated from
the ongoing events (both immediate and recursive) in the pre-service teachers’ practicum experience. It
seems that, in the future, Peter should make more explicit the distinct and contrasting difference between
reflecting upon events as a responsible participant in the world with the others, and reflecting upon the
events through de-contextualized concepts and strategies. His students should have had more
opportunities to discuss these two approaches, their implications and their pros and cons, as well as to
reflect on their own ways of approaching children and others in different situations. Alternatively (or even
in addition), some of the pre-service teachers might evoke neo-liberal ideologies focusing on a
hegemonic notion of “personal responsibility,” thus blaming victims like Devon, while ignoring systemic
institutional and societal pressures and injustice (Stringer, 2014). Peter might have investigated these
diverse hypotheses to problematize them with his students.
Third, it seems that Peter needed to develop a way of sharing excitement and enjoyment in
engaging with children at the Center with the university students. Perhaps Peter could reflect upon his
enjoyment and excitement with the pre-service teachers more directly, asking students to reflect upon
their enjoyable and exciting moments in working with children and what specifically made such
experiences enjoyable. As Becker (1953) argued, guided interpretation of ambiguous experiences can
become a part of learning to enjoy an activity with others. Enjoyment in working with children is socially
learned and socially framed24 rather than “natural,” and requires a community of participants who engage
in discussing how and why they enjoy it (it is arguably not something seen as immediately pleasurable). It
may be necessary to more explicitly discuss why or why not students are enjoying or not enjoying the
experience of working with children. As Becker writes about emergent authorial agency in a practice,
If a stable form of new behaviour toward the object is to emerge, a transformation of meanings must
occur, in which the person develops a new conception of the nature of the object. This happens in a series of
communicative acts in which others point out new aspects of his experience to him, present him with new
interpretations of events, and help him achieve a new conceptual organization of his world, without which the
new behaviour is not possible. Persons who do not achieve the proper kind of conceptualization are unable to
engage in the given behaviour and turn off in the direction of some other relationship to the object or activity (H.
Becker, 1953, p. 242).
Fourth is about problematizing of education itself for the students. The purpose of education may not be
in making people good – e.g., making Devon prosocial and non-aggressive, make Devon to clean toys
after himself, make Devon polite, make Devon civilized, make Devon cooperative, and so on. These
desires may be important but they may not be educational in themselves. The purpose of education can
be in engaging students in deciding for themselves what “good” means, to examine life, to test diverse
ideas in a critical dialogue (Plato, 1997). In the future, Peter may want to engage his students, preservice
teachers, in a critical ontological dialogue about the purpose of education and ontologies behind diverse
purposes (e.g., pedagogy of survival and necessity vs. pedagogy of leisure, imagination, and desirability).
Peter should make the contrast between conventional Standard-Based technological agency-free
education and DEFFAA more visible for his future students so they can engage in a critical dialogic
investigation of them and their own educational values. However, this advice is contradictory, reflecting
the major paradox of education. We see the major paradox of education as the following: the major goal
of education must be a part of education itself – i.e., a part of the students’ own critical dialogue – and
24 Cf. “No one would fall in love if he hadn't read about it first'' Francois de la Rochefoucauld (French writer, 1613-1680).
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cannot pre-exist the education practice or be decided by the instructor in advance (or in our advice to
Peter). This paradox includes the students’ right not to adopt DEFFAA approach as a part of their
successful education. However, this non-adoption should be a result of their critical examination of
DEFFAA and other educational philosophies and not a gut decision, an opinionship, or a result of
students’ prior socialization. Of course, the latter demand involves smuggling DEFFAA into the criteria of
“successful education” – the paradox remains….
Of course, our suggestions would not guarantee a success for Peter or any future educators –
nothing does, according to a dialogic authorial approach. However, they represent reasonable and
plausible hypotheses to test and interesting and promising provocations to try in future educational
practice guided by the authorial approach.
Conclusions
In our view, a dialogic authorial pedagogical approach starts with a certain quality of the teacher
being with the student. This quality involves mutual interest in each other – what they think and how they
feel about the world and the self (cf. the concept of interaddressivity, Matusov, 2011c) -- and mutual
respect. The latter involves legitimacy of non-cooperation and non-participation. For Peter and Devon
their quality of being together was based on their having fun through improvisational play suggested by
Peter. For John and Devon, their quality of being together seemed to emerge more from interest in,
puzzlement with, and attraction to each other. For Peter and his university students, their quality of being
together seemed to come from mutual interest in each being taken seriously and from Peter’s
pedagogical desire to be helpful to his students. By being helpful, Peter accepted the validity of the way
the students defined their inquiries, but he did not express agreement with the formulation of their
inquiries.
At the same time, Peter and John’s successes in promoting critical dialogues among the
undergraduate students – and their desires, worldviews, and pedagogical approaches – in their work with
Devon were limited. On the positive side, Peter apparently managed to engage his students in
puzzlement, hypothesizing their dear beliefs, considering alternatives, searching for a pedagogical
approach to a problem they experienced, and considering his own pedagogical approach unfamiliar to
them. He also seemed to guide John successfully into engaging in a dialogic authorial guidance with
Devon. Finally, John was successful in engaging Devon (and some other LCC children) in critical
dialogue about considering a desired approach for being asked to do something. However, Peter seemed
to fail to make his students recognize his dialogic authorial approach with them and with Devon, and
consider it as an alternative to a technological approach with which they were familiar.
Dialogic education for and from authorial agency (DEFFAA), a new paradigm in education, is
based in a fundamentally different orientation and set of purposes than the technological agency-free
approach. Dialogic education for and from authorial agency grounded in this set of premises and values is
characterized by the following qualities that we described as an authorial approach and contrasted to the
currently prevailing technological approach. An authorial approach to education is an extension of the
dialogic understanding of human authorial agency — in which both the student and the teacher
participate in authoring their own new, unpredictable beings-in-the-world, their new desires and new
subjectivities which cannot be pre-planned or known in advance by anyone including themselves. This
process is supported by having rich opportunities for problem defining; being encouraged in making
unpredictable turns and connections; mutual appreciation and respect as well as recognition and
acceptance of the collision of diverging desires.
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1. The dialogic authorial approach to education focuses on the relational nature of human activity and
discourse, rather than the technological, which focuses on acquiring knowledge and skills as tools detached
from their purposes and use. As tools, knowledge and skills must be knowingly authored and authentically
desired. Otherwise, tools, in themselves, cannot be used to develop and assist human beings and their lived
purposes because someone is authoring someone else without their consent – i.e., without an “authorial
signature” (Bakhtin, 1993). The technologically minded/guided teachers can only manipulate unconscious or
enforce resisted or compliant behaviors. Thus, by nature these tools, and their uses, are either non- or even
anti-educational.25
2. Authoring is anti-manipulative. In education, pedagogical manipulation entails forcing predefined curricula on
students, in a pre-defined, lock-step pace, through predefined instructional and motivational management
strategies, regardless of or in exploitation of the students’ interests, understanding and values26. Any
expression of students’ authorial agency may (and often does) create a deviation, difference and non-
compliance to this rigid and predetermined set of procedures, a problem that needs to be eliminated. In
contrast, authoring includes participants in the dialogic devising, exposing, and setting of agendas, goals,
problems, journeys, and provocations, exposing boundary objects and their reification for potential re-
negotiation, and includes all affected members.
3. Authorial education sets purposes and goals, but cannot be based on predefined curricular endpoints or
officially preset explicit or implicit agendas. Such pre-defined and, therefore, depersonalized and
decontextualized endpoints - i.e. reified knowledge and skills, position teachers to look for ways to control
learners in a universal, abstract, non-eventful, technological, and impersonal manner. This is dangerous
because teachers’ and learners’ agencies are ignored and devalued.
4. To re t ur n ba c k t o h u ma n it a ri an m e an i ng o f t h e n ot i on o f “ e du c at i on ” expressed in its etymology in diverse
languages, education has to focus on authorial agency (DEFFAA) rather than on curricular standards
(technological agency-free education).
Authorial Agency (aka DEFFAA) is incompatible with conventional Standard-Based technological
agency-free education. It is important to consider how educational institutions and even DEFFAA-minded
educators can create conditions for DEFFAA in their own local settings, often shaped by the conventional
Standard-Based technological agency-free education and hegemonic neoliberal agenda. In our judgment,
DEFFAA can flow in full only when our society transforms from survival- and need-based into leisure- and
agency-based.
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Acknowledgements
Eugene Matusov: I would like to acknowledge Yifat Ben-David Kolikant and her students from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They read a previous draft of this paper which generated a heated
discussion among them around the issue of dialogue and pragmatism. Their discussion greatly helped
me in revisions of the paper.
Ana Marjanovic-Shane: I would like to acknowledge my late friend and colleague, Mima Pešić,
with whom I had numerous talks about our paper. Her sharp questions helped me connect some of the
ideas she and her colleagues forged in the “Belgrade School of preschool education” to the ideas we
were developing in our paper.
Dialogic Education for and from Authorial Agency
Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Elizabeth Soslau, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Katherine von Duyke
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | Vol. 4 (2016)
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