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Response to “A Student’s Right to Freedom of Education”
Full text linkDr. Eugene Matusov’s article “A Student’s Right to Freedom of Education,” promotes a system of education which is vastly different from how education has been generally approached for the past century. Matusov writes that freedom in education is an integral part to what education means (Matusov, SF3). This is my response to his article
Moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education
Full text linkThe purpose of this article is to examine and conceptualize our pedagogical and organizational experiences and understandings of how undergraduates and instructors participating in the UC-Links Project from Fall 1996 to Spring 1997 learned together through their engagements in undergraduate courses and afterschool activities with predominantly Mexican-descent children at a local community center. We had started our project privileging collaboration and collaborative guidance as the way to approach our collective engagements; however, the events in the project pushed us to reconsider our practice. It took us 25 years to completely understand that what we have come to call “critical dialoguing in action” is how we now conceive of innovative organizational and pedagogical practice, which stands in contrast to the pedagogical and organizational notion of collaboration. We describe the efforts and struggles participants, including ourselves, encountered developing, implementing, and communicating about innovative teaching approaches and practices that we originally thought aimed to promote meaningful and collaborative learning. We call particular attention to dilemmas participants faced dialoguing about the dynamic teaching/learning processes that emerged in our project. These experiences prompted us to characterize our vision for participants’ involvement in the project as “critical dialoguing in action,” which contributed to our ongoing analysis and understanding of emerging dilemmas in our work
Education-for-Myself and Education-for-the Other: The Right to Freedom of Education and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Experience
Full text linkThe article contains reflections on the problem which has arised in Eugene Matusov\u27s article on freedom of education, and considers the experience of Mikhail Bakhtin as an example of the way the right to the freedom can be fulfilled. Not only Bakhtin\u27s life and ideas play a significant role in contemporary social and educational theories and practices, but they reveal how education becomes a result of selection of particular knowledge and one\u27s conscious choice. The core of the article is a correlation of notions “Education-for-myself” and “Education-for-the other” which are taken by the authors as derivatives of the terms of Bakhtin’s early philosophy “I-for-myself” and “I-for-the other”. Thus ideas of “Education-for-an individual” and “Education-for-the society” result from the reflections and can be evidence of the need in mutual understanding and dialogue in order to achieve freedom of education
Dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article
Full text linkThis article presents a study that aims to identify and analyze dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article. The data were collected in the Research Laboratory entitled \u27Workshop of Reading, Writing and Rewriting of Opinion Articles\u27, an activity of the Research Group UTFPR-CNPq LAD\u27Humano, in 2015. The opinion articles were written by first term undergraduate students of the Letters Teacher Certification Program in Portuguese-English of the Federal University of Technology of Paraná, Brazil, Pato Branco Campus. The writing of the texts was recorded by the software AutoScreen Recorder and Inputlog. The analyses are mainly based on Bakhtin, Volosinov, and Vygotsky and show that repair by lexical synonymy has the dialogic functions of addressing the target audience of the text, of textual adjustment, of giving the desired content to discourse and of acting in the process of construction of the writer\u27s image. As "the meaning of the word is completely determined by its context" (BAKHTIN/VOLOCHÍNOV, 2014, p.109), it is the verbal and extraverbal context of a certain word choice that will contribute or not to building the meaning intended by the writer, and that is why synonymy study in the process of writing is important
“Yes, but…” Yes, and…” - A Sympathetic Challenge (and Reframing) of Matusov’s “The Right for Freedom of Education.”
Full text linkIn this response to Matusov\u27s "Right for Freedom in Education," I will offer two “yes, but…” concerns about crucial complexities of this freedom that I think Matusov leaves unaddressed, and a “yes, and…” alternative pragmatic justification of this freedom that differs from, but I think is more compelling than, Matusov’s
Who Sets the Limits of Educational Freedom? Exploring Bakhtin’s Architectonic Self as a Response to Matusov’s “A Student’s Right to Freedom of Education”
Full text linkThis article is a response to Matusov\u27s argument for a student\u27s right to define the limits of their own education. While I agree with Matusov\u27s premise, I argue that his solution is framed as a dualism, which may undermine the dialogic principles of his call to students\u27 educational freedoms. I propose that viewing students\u27 educational freedoms through Bakhtin\u27s arhcitectonic self removes the dualism of Matusov\u27s argument, and close by providing an example of the architectonic self in practice within the teacher-student relationship
Pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education
Full text linkFrom a conventional monological view, meaning-making is located in a particular statement. In conventional schools, students are positioned to be enactors of ready-made knowledge and skills on teacher’s demand based on their pattern-recognition and production, rather than to be authors of their own education, learning, knowledge, and meaning. Pattern recognition involves the emergence of active production of diverse potential patterns that may or may not approximate well the targeted pattern (“sprouting”). The sprouting can be guided (“supervised”) by an expert or unguided, mediated or unmediated. These diverse potential patterns are sequentially evaluated about how likely each of them can be close to the targeted pattern. In each evaluation, the probabilistic confidence of some patterns grows while some other patterns decrease. In contrast, according to Bakhtin, meaning-making is defined as the relationship between a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question and serious response to it. From the Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, a statement does not have any meaning until it is viewed as a reply to some question in an internally persuasive discourse. A student’s meaning-making process starts with a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question raised by the student. At least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. Another aspect of dialogic meaning-making is interaddressivity. A student is interested in other people: 1) in what other people may think and how they feel about it; however these people define this it, and 2) in other people as such – in what they are doing, feeling, relating, and thinking about; in the relationship with these people; in the potential that these people may realize and offer; and so on
Exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education: “Terrified to love this way of learning, its idea of being free”
Full text linkIn this reflective paper, I respond to Dr. Matusov’s (2020) eloquent philosophical exploration of “students’ right to freedom of education. In doing so, I pursue a narrative inquiry (Bruner, 1987; Clandinin, Murphy, Huber, & Orr, 2010; Clandinin, 2013; Hong, Falter, & Fecho, 2017) to explore my students’ self-generated meanings of their educational freedom in our teacher education classroom. I wonder whether freedom of education can be presented as a transcendental concept of self-examination and taught as the student’s right for it without a critical deconstruction of the tentious and fictitious materiality of freedom. Also, I wonder what my students think when they are provoked to claim their right to freedom of education. This reflection reveals that students’ right of freedom is not necessarily about their own self-examination, freedom is a creative force of self-expression. More specifically, freedom is the self-conscious act of discovery of itself (i.e., freedom) in everything my students do as a part of their classroom learning and education. All in all, freedom does not have any meaning at all since meaning emerges in the act of freedom itself, or rather in the creative act of being free
A student’s right to freedom of education
Full text linkThis conceptual essay, which opens the special issue, examines why a student’s right to freedom of education – the right for a student to define their own education – is so crucial for the education itself. Four diverse educational approaches are considered: training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination, along with the Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy to reveal the need for freedom of education within each of the approaches and the pedagogy. The eight aspects of the right to freedom are explicated. Three major objections against the right are considered and rebuked: 1) the Kantian paradox of autonomy and paternalism in education, 2) the paradox of learning and ignorance, and 3) fear of non-participation in education without coercion. The legitimate limitations of the right are discussed. Finally, the two major pathways to the right – radical and gradual – are analyzed.
I sent the earlier draft of the paper to the Dialogic Pedagogy journal community, asking for critical commentaries. Many people submitted their critical commentaries involving their agreements, disagreements, associative readings, extensions, evaluations, and so on. My paper, their commentaries constitute this special, and my reply constitutes this special issue. Three people – David Kirshner, Belkacem TAIEB, and Jim Rietmulder – chose to provide commentaries on the margins. I included most of their comments on the margins as a new genre to promote a critical dialogue in our readers. Also, Belkacem TAIEB and Matthew Shumski submitted short commentaries that I included, below, at the end of this article as Appendix I and II. Jim Cresswell shared the manuscript with his undergraduate psychology students, and one student volunteered to add her commentary. Shelly Price-Jones shared it with her international undergraduate students studying English at a South Korean university. Twenty-one of them chose to provide a video reply. I selected a few of them that attracted my attention. Finally, I chose to address some of the issues brought in the presented critical commentaries either as my reply on the margins or at the end of this special issue. This should not be taken as “the final word” in the debate, but rather a dialogic response inviting other responses in the authors and in the audience
Free Will and Heutagogy
Full text linkIn this paper we argue that there are at least two conditions for the adequate realization of the capacity of free will – and thus of the realization of the right to freedom of education – that are missing from Matusov\u27s account, and needed to be integrated with it in order to enable the successful implementation of the right to freedom of education principle. We will then offer a different typology of the field of education, a typology that is complementary, rather than contradictory, to Matusov\u27s typology, and use this typology – especially the concept of heutagogy – to offer a way that optimizes freedom of will in educatio