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Dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality
Full text linkTechnological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. The abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during COVID-19 has accelerated big tech’s coup d’état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. Yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners’ input and interactions. Mikhail Bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. His theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. This study traces links between Bakhtin’s dialogism with Peirce’s semiotics. Conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. Taking augmented reality as a theoretical case, inquiry illustrates that while technologies are subsuming traditional pedagogies, teachers and learners, this does not necessarily open dialogic learning. This is because technologies are never dialogic, in and of themselves, although semiotic learning always involves social actors’ interpretations of signs. Crucially, semiotic-dialogism generates theorising of the visual literacies required by learners to optimise technologies for dialogic learning
Is dialogic teaching sustainable? Portrait of a teacher three years after completing a teacher development programme
Full text linkThis study deals with the question of whether a change in classroom discourse implemented through teacher professional development (TPD) is sustainable over time. I studied one teacher’s practices and thinking three years after completing a TPD programme focused on dialogic teaching. The data were collected through interviews with the teacher and video recordings of her lessons. The data showed that the teacher continued with dialogic teaching, but she appropriated and modified the concept of dialogic teaching to serve her own needs and preferences. The way the teacher overcame obstacles to sustaining the implemented change is discussed in the study
Supervision, Advisement and Dialogic Pedagogy: present day issues and provocations for the future
Full text linkThis article is a reflection on the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal (DPJ) Special Issue on Supervision and Advisement. Altogether five articles made it through a rigorous double-blind peer review process and crossed the finishing line to become a part of this special issue. Supervision and advisement are areas of education where Dialogic Pedagogy approach is a welcome guest as learning and teaching constructs that are used in these areas require various forms of dialogue. This special issue is a humble but a promising beginning for the special issues on supervision and advisement in this journal. All the studies included in this special issue are good examples of well-done scientific endeavors that can be used as illustrations of how a good piece of research should be executed and reported. However, the question remains if the means of analyses used in these studies are satisfactory enough so that we could understand to the fullest the complexities of the co-lived lives of the participants in supervisory and advisement relationships and co-learned knowledge that all the participants have gained
The New Heresy and the Modern Inquisition
Full text linkIn this paper, I look critically at a new trend on college campuses regarding the banning of certain words, especially the biggest racial taboo word in the USA. I contend that these new bans impede the rise of a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament, ultimately promoting and legitimizing violence as good and necessary
Fruitful Inspiration: Fresh View on Bakhtinian Dialogism in Some Fields of the Humanities
Full text linkA review of Matthias Freise (ed.), 2018., Inspired by Bakhtin: Dialogic Methods in the Humanities, Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
This review provides an analysis of a collection of articles that demonstrate the possibilities of applying dialogic methods in various fields of the humanities. The authors of these articles show how Bakhtinian dialogism functions in the history and theory of literature, sociology and design, in the study of Platonic dialogues, the image of the Other in contemporary cinema and in the practice of psychoanalysis.
The reviewers emphasize that the book fits well with the Bakhtin Studies trend. The dialogical approach to the phenomena of human consciousness allows a new research paradigm that differs from the natural sciences. The emphasis should be placed on the internal relations among the objects of the humanities research. The latter should be considered as a form of dialogue and described within the framework of dialogic methods. Each of the authors gives their own answer to the questions formulated by M. Freise: “How can we define a dialogic method of research in the humanities in general, what would be the specific qualities of such a method?” As a result, reviewers believe, a convincing picture of the internal dialogism of the humanities is constructed in the book.
Despite the fact that special articles on the dialogic method in pedagogy are not included in the book, reviewers believe that the book will be useful for theorists and practitioners of education
The relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy
Full text linkEducation is often viewed as formalized learning. I argue that the relationship between education and formalized learning is more complex and profound. In this conceptual essay, I examine the relationship between education and learning. Specifically, I discuss the cases when learning is not education and education is not learning. I argue that learning becomes educational when the person, the learner themselves, appreciates their learning. When learning is not appreciated by the learner, it does not constitute that person’s education. Thus, education is an ephemeral subjective construct, prone to appear and disappear as the person’s attitude to their learning changes. Also, education can be non-learning-based when it involves insights – abrupt, discontinuous changes of the person’s subjectivity – which are not caused by and rooted in the person’s experiences. Like learning, for an insight to be educational, it has to be perceived and appreciated by the person. I argue that human life consists of the flow of learning and insight. Noticing learning and insight by the person involves discontinuity of the person’s subjectivity, participation in activities, and other people that is recognized by others and the person. I discuss diverse forms of the person’s appreciation of learning and insights that constitute education. These forms vary from the behaviorist appreciation, as its lowest form, to the critical appreciation through critical dialogue as its highest form. Finally, I consider the consequences of defining education through a person’s appreciation of the transformation of their subjectivity for dialogic pedagogy
Social education through the lens of Bakhtinian theory
Full text linkA review of Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education, Edited by Craig Brandist, Michael E. Gardiner, E. Jayne White and Carl Mika. L.: Routledge. 2020. 160 p.
The review of the collection of articles Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education represents an analysis of the perspectives, main trends, and interpretations of key points, ideas, and concepts of M. M. Bakhtin in the contemporary theory and practice of Social Education.
The book’s nine chapters are grouped within three problem areas, researched by the book’s contributors. This is, in the first place, a re-establishment of those philosophical and sociological sources that trace back to the roots of Bakhtin’s early views that had defined the nature of his responses to the challenges of his time in his early philosophical texts, books about Dostoevsky and books about bildungsroman. Another field of examination is Bakhtin\u27s late dialogue with his contemporaries. Sometimes this dialogue is active and obvious, as it happens in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s. Sometimes this dialogue turns out to be ambiguous, therefore researchers can only guess how to reconstruct it, basing their views on the complementarity of Bakhtin’s ideas and Lev Vygotsky or Paulo Freire’s ones.
An equally important aspect of this collection is a number of articles devoted to how Bakhtin\u27s theory is transformed into "classroom practice", whether it concerns the use of dialogue and its capabilities in interaction with foreigners, providing educational opportunities to the most economically vulnerable segments of South African society, or communication with preschoolers in kindergarten.
The authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how Bakhtinian theory is becoming one of the most important elements of contemporary theory and practice of education. At the same time, not only Bakhtinian ideas, primarily the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival, and chronotope, are important, but also that free polyphony, which puts into effect any creative practice
Subjectivity and change in process of supervision
Full text linkSupervising texts with a bachelor thesis as its outcome, has been prioritized in the Norwegian Early Childhood Teacher Education. The focus has been on recruiting enough supervisors, and on qualifying supervisors. There has not been a similar focus on the bachelor texts as such, and on questions concerning what kind of function these texts should have in professional education. From a Bakhtinian dialogic perspective we value variation and change in student subjectivity as a fruitful, rather than a problematic means of enhancing quality. The current study has two main research questions: (1) what typologies of subjectivity can be identified in student’s bachelor texts, and (2) what typologies of subjectivity are given priority and how these priorities respond to the possibility of change. Concerning the first question, students’ legitimations have been identified as typologies of uncomplicated and complex subjectivity. As for the second question we observed that individual voices in bachelor students’ texts were not given equal status compared with more powerful generic voices that represent sameness. The latter voices are interpreted as articulated intentions in the national curriculum for the Early Childhood Education and Care, and in local curricula. An important insight from this study is that changes in subjectivity is tightly connected to sameness for all bachelor students and educational cannons. Student subjectivity seems to be fixed and finished and in status of adjustment to universal claims. Such insight generates new questions concerning the space for students’ lived experience, emotions and creativity in higher education.  
Response to “Moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education” by Matusov & Pease-Alverez, 2020
Full text linkHere I reflect and respond to the article on Critical Dialogue in Action: “Moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education” by Matusov and Pease-Alvarez, 202
A student\u27s right to freedom of education and a teacher\u27s fiduciary obligation to support it: A reply to the commentaries
Full text linkI feel honored to receive so many deep, critical, supportive, expanding, and thought-provoking commentaries on my original paper “A student’s right to freedom of education” from undergraduate university students, educators, and educational researchers. These commentaries involve different genres: on-the-margin contextual comments, theoretical essays, ethnographies of their pedagogical practices, reflective sharing of good and bad personal educational experiences, personal authorial opinions, critiques, students’ course evaluations, analysis of science-fiction literature, investigation of Bakhtin’s biography, video replies, a list of questions, and so on. Once Socrates complained about the print text that it is impossible to ask the text new questions – the text won’t reply to these questions. In this special essay, we tried to overcome this problem by involving each other in address-reply commentaries on each other’s texts. We want to invite the readers of this special issue to join us in our dialogues of agreement and disagreement.
In my reply to the commentaries, I want to focus on the issues raised by the commentators that most touched me. This focus is on the relationship between a student’s authorial education and a teacher’s authorial teaching, where “teacher” is understood on a range between an individual educator and the entire society. I want to apologize in advance if I left out important concerns that some of the commentators wanted me to address (feel free to raise it again on the margin) if I severely misinterpreted their idea or point (please correct me on the margin).
Here I focused on the following six major issues raised by the commentators. The first issue is raised by several undergraduate students from Canada, Russia, and South Korea about the possibility (and reality) of some students actively rejecting their freedom of education. Isn’t it a case for rejection of my call for a student’s right to freedom of education? The second issue raised by many commentators is about imaginary and real cases when foisted education is effective and even, arguably, more effective than student-owned education. Do these cases defeat my overall argument that student’s freedom of education is required by education itself? The third issue was introduced by my colleague and a proponent of self-directed learning Kevin Currie-Knight when he asked a deceptively simple question of what I mean by “student.” Usually, the role of a student is defined either by the institution or by the teacher, which implicitly goes against the spirit of my claim for a student’s right to freedom of education. The fourth issue eloquently raised by an Ecuadorian undergraduate exchange student, Juan Francisco Poveda, studying at the Kyung Hee University in Seoul, about whether education must be subordinated to the needs of the society. Fifth, I consider the relationship between the education-for-myself and the education-for-the-other, the new terms introduced by my Russian colleagues. My overall vista in considering this relationship is authorship: the student’s educational authorship or the teacher’s pedagogical authorship. In a disagreement with some commentators and in an agreement with some other commentators, I argue that the teacher’s pedagogical authorship must be subordinated to the student’s educational authorship through the teacher’s pedagogical fiduciary obligation. Finally, I will revisit the Kantian educational paternalism by considering the two, arguably, most powerful and extreme cases for foisted education: foisted education for the survival of the society and foisted education for a student’s agency awakening. In my conclusion, I will summarize the presented reasons for why a student’s freedom is needed for education and briefly discuss how to test my claims