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Avoiding Dialogues of Non-discovery through Promoting Dialogues of Discovery
Get PDFInternational students and direct entrants—those entering a higher year of a degree—often come from socio-economic or cultural backgrounds different from traditional students, and have different educational backgrounds. It is assumed such students need help with unfamiliar assessment tasks such as essays, reports, and so on, and many sources aim to help with these elements. Further assumptions are that dialogue helps, and that the words used in such dialogue will be understood similarly. Yet, if the assumed meanings of the words actually differ, then such dialogue is based on a false assumption; rather than genuine dialogue, what actually occurs is an exchange of monologic utterances. This article is a structured narrative of our ongoing research into how key assessment task words such as ‘discuss,’ ‘analyse,’ and ‘critically evaluate’ are understood differently in higher education. We describe how such differences are perpetuated through Martin Buber’s (1947) ideas of monologic utterances, and what we call ‘dialogues of non-discovery’. Here we detail a research-based approach to promote genuine and technical dialogue: what we call ‘dialogues of discovery.’ We first introduce a dialogue that led to the genesis of the study and theoretical context of our dialogues with the literature. We then detail our methods of data collection in a section of ‘dialogues of exploration’. We present our findings in the form of categorizations of the different elements underpinning people’s understandings of ‘the word.’ Our own categorizations of these elements encourage dialogue around the elements of language, culture, stakeholder, subject, weight, and development over time. This is an approach we term an ‘anti-glossary approach’ in that it is opposite to, and against, ‘fixing’ or ‘ossifying’ the language in a glossary. In the Bakhtinian tradition of ‘incompletedness,’ we conclude by encouraging readers to take and adapt our findings as an ‘anti-glossary’ approach to engage in genuine and technical dialogue with their students. In this way, we believe the quality and depth of student work can improve
Meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground
Get PDFThe article articulates an educational motto – expressed in the title – found in a ‘prototypical narrative’ of social youth work carried out by activists in Copenhagen in the 1990s. This way of modeling pedagogical practice is first outlined as different from the standardizing approach dominant in science. As a prototypical narrative, the story alternates between descriptions and contextualizations of events, theoretical debate, and analytical suggestions. The key idea that is unfolded is the ‘critical trans-pedagogy’ of a creation and tinkering of collectives and their participants in struggles for recognition, and for the democratic social engineering of a responsive welfare state. It is suggested that a singular historical situation spurred this development, both in the practical youth work, and in the theoretical traditions with which I could articulate it. This included the post-industrial crisis of labor, the post-cold-war shaking of state forms, New Public Management, and the simultaneous expansion and attack on the welfare state. It also included how the Foucauldian rethinking of power and the performative turn in the social sciences informed the broadly Vygotskian traditions. On these backgrounds, the youth work practices could be approached as generalizing, performative reenactments of social problems. The approach is finally spelled out in and around the story of one participant, before the concluding remarks return to the issue of how a prototypical narrative deals with theory
Reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations within early childhood research
Get PDFAbstractBook review: Albon, D. & Rosen, R. (2014) Negotiating Adult - Child Relationships in Early Childhood Research, London: Routledge.This book review focuses on a number of themes highlighted within the book. Firstly, it discusses the authors’ suggestion that Bakhtin can assist researchers in addressing entrenched, authoritative assumptions in an attempt to gain fresh perspectives. It moves on to consider the authors’ view on how researchers might valuably reframe common research activities, in order that research with young children reflects the dialogic nature of research relationships
Dialogical Grammar: Varieties of Dialogue in Wittgenstein’s Methodology
Get PDFThe dialogical character of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has received scant attention in the literature, given the work’s status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations. The main lines of interpretation that have been proposed see dialogue as a rhetorical technique intended to present erroneous positions and then refute them, as an exemplification of what can be expressed in language (McGinn 1997; Rhees 1998), or as a reflection of Wittgenstein’s informal teaching method (Malcolm 2001; Savickey et al. 1990). The present article adopts the perspective that Wittgenstein’s use of dialogue makes it possible to track the various modes of language-acts, consonant with his directions to examine the daily use of language (Wittgenstein 2009, §116 and esp. §132), “when language is, as it were, idling.” In his later inquiries, Wittgenstein frequently considers the nature of mental states, accompanied by an attempt to characterize the differences between them while at the same time dealing with the cases in which it is difficult to distinguish them. In this process he made a variety of uses of dialogue, each of which embodies a different aspect of language action. Subsequently I will demonstrate that these different uses are not haphazard. A scrutiny of the nature of the dialogue can help us understand the nature of the activity carried out of the state of consciousness. Finally, I propose a distinction among three main types of dialogue: technical, conversational, and reflexive
Legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education
Get PDFModern conventional education is full of impositions on its students. Schools often impose on students where they must be, what they must do and learn, how they must behave and communicate in the places and the ways that the teacher and school define. However, the legitimacy of this imposition – how much of this imposition is necessary, useful, justified, and desirable for education itself – has not been specifically discussed and analyzed yet. The legitimacy of this imposition is especially important to do for innovative education, evaluating and reconsidering its goals and practices of education. Analysis of imposition in education can help to address important questions of why oppression, alienation, if not pedagogical violence, are so prevalent in organized education and whether this is can be avoided or not. The goal of this paper is to consider different approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education, its legitimacy, and justifications and analyze their pros and cons. I consider Totalizing conventional, Capitalist, Progressive, Democratic, Anarchist, and Communitarian educational approaches to non-negotiable imposition and its legitimacy from an educational perspective
Values in dialogic pedagogy
Get PDFIn November 2014 on the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal Facebook page, there was an interesting discussion of the issue of values in dialogic pedagogy[1]. The main issue can be characterized as the following. Should dialogic pedagogy teach values? Should it avoid teaching values? Is there some kind of a third approach? The participants of the Facebook discussions were focusing on teaching values in dialogic pedagogy and not about teaching aboutvalues. On the one hand, it seems to be impossible to avoid teaching values. However, on the other hand, shaping students in some preset molding is apparently non-dialogic and uncritical (Matusov, 2009). In the former case, successful teaching is defined by how well and deeply the students accept and commit to the taught values. In the latter case, successful dialogic teaching may be defined by students’ critical examination of their own values against alternative values in a critical dialogue. Below, Eugene Matusov and Jay Lemke, active participants of this Facebook dialogue, provide their reflection on this important issue and encourage readers to join their reflective dialogue.[1] See in a public Facebook domain: https://www.facebook.com/DialogicPedagogyJournal/posts/894734337204533, https://www.facebook.com/DialogicPedagogyJournal/posts/89691685031961
Literature Discussions as Mangles of Practice: Sociological Theories of Emergence and/in Dialogic Learning Events
Get PDFIn this report, we argue that some of the most productive and edifying kinds of literature discussions among certain ages/grade levels may be best understood as “mangles of practice” (Pickering, 1995). Mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing transformations of ongoing social activities, as well as unpredictable outcomes or products. Indeed, the discussions we studied had these characteristics. They often involved both planned and contingent actions and reactions by individual, social, cultural, and material agents and agencies. As such, they were emergent phenomena about which we could seldom predict what precise collections, collisions, and collusions of actions and reactions would occur within them or what the effects of these collections, collisions, and collusions would be. In spite of (or more likely because of) their unpredictability, these discussions were extremely dynamic knowledge-producing activities. Given this social fact, we think our findings contribute significantly to understanding the lineaments and potentials of dialogic pedagogy, which deepens students’ learning and development. More specifically, when teachers successfully prompt and engage students in more robustly dialogic talk that promotes text-to-life connections, life-to text connections, linkages to non-school knowledge (like that of popular culture), etc., then students often reap a wide variety of benefits with respect to their abilities to engage in genuine inquiry, to reason and argue for particular interpretations, to evaluate complex human actions and decisions, and to develop principled social, cultural, and moral equipment for living their own lives
Chronotopes in education: Conventional and dialogic
Get PDFBakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur. Here, in this conceptual paper, I expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that I abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around Dialogic Pedagogy. Frist is the Assignment Chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. Second is the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. Third is the Journey Chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). Educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered
Dialogic Multicultural Education Theory and Praxis: Dialogue and the Problems of Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society
Get PDFThe purpose of this theoretical article is to highlight the role that dialogic pedagogy can play in critical multicultural education for pre-service teachers. The article starts by discussing the problematic that critical multicultural education poses in a democratic society that claims freedom of speech and freedom of expression as a basic tenet of democracy. Through investigating research findings in the field of critical multicultural education in higher education, the author argues that many of the educational approaches-including the ones that claim dialogue to be their main instructional tool- could be described as undemocratic, and thus have done more harm than good for the multicultural objectives. On the other hand, the author argues that dialogic pedagogy could be a better approach for critical multicultural education as it promises many opportunities for learning that do not violate the students’ rights of freedom of expression and freedom of association. Throughout this paper, the author tries to clarify the difference between dialogic pedagogy and other conceptualizations of dialogue in critical multicultural education arguing for the better suitability of dialogic pedagogy for providing a safer learning environment that encompasses differing and at times conflicting voices
Bakhtin for Preschool Teachers
Get PDFBook Review: White, E. J. (2015). Introducing dialogic pedagogy: Provocations for the early years: Routledge.I am impressed by the depth of White’s understanding of Bakhtin’s work and by her innovated uses of Bakhtinian concepts such as answerability, becoming, aesthetics, authorship and polyphony. White’s book represents a very important effort to bring these concepts to early childhood education practitioners. In this review I discuss White’s ways of making these Bakhtinian concepts accessible to ECE teachers and I provide the necessary context for appreciating the significance of White’s contribution